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Afro-American Folksongs
A STUDY
IN RACIAL AND NATIONAL MUSIC
BY
Henry Edward Krehbiel
Author of
“Studies in the Wagnerian Drama,” “How to Listen to
Music,” “Music and Manners in the Classical
Period,” “Chapters of Opera,” “A Book
of Operas,” “The Pianoforte and
its Music,” etc., etc.
9
G. SCHIRMER
NEW YORK AND LONDON
Copyright, 1914, by
G. Schirmer
24289
TO MY FRIEND
HORATIO W. PARKER, Mus. Doc.
Professor of Music at Yale University
PREFACE
This book was written with the purpose of bringing a
species of folksong into the field of scientific observation
and presenting it as fit material for artistic treatment.
It is a continuation of a branch of musical study for which
the foundation was laid more than a decade ago in a series
of essays with bibliographical addenda printed in the New
York “Tribune,” of which journal the author has been the
musical reviewer for more than thirty years. The general
subject of those articles was folksongs and their relation to
national schools of composition. It had come to the writer’s
knowledge that the articles had been clipped from the
newspaper, placed in envelopes and indexed in several
public libraries, and many requests came to him from li-
brarians and students that they be republished in book-
form. This advice could not be acted upon because the
articles were mere outlines, ground-plans, suggestions and
guides to the larger work or works which the author hoped
would the be the result of his instigation.
Folksong literature has grown considerably since then,
especially in Europe, but the subject of paramount interest
to the people of the United States has practically been
ignored. The songs created by the negroes while they
were slaves on the plantations of the South have cried out
in vain for scientific study, though “ragtime” tunes, which
are their debased offspring, have seized upon the fancy of
the civilized world. This popularity may be deplorable,
but it serves at least to prove that a marvellous potency
lies in the characteristic rhythmical element of the slave
songs. Would not a wider and truer knowledge of their
other characteristics as well lead to the creation of a better
art than that which tickles the ears and stimulates the feet
of the pleasure-seekers of London, Paris, Berlin and Vienna
even more than it does those of New York?
The charm of the Afro-American songs has been widely
recognized, but no musical savant has yet come to analyze
them. Their two most obvious elements only have been
copied by composers and dance-makers, who have wished
[ v ]
PREFACE
to imitate them. These elements are the rhythmical
propulsion which comes from the initial syncopation com-
mon to the bulk of them (the “snap” or “catch” which in an
exaggerated form lies at the basis of “ragtime”) and the
frequent use of the five-tone or pentatonic scale. But
there is much more that is characteristic in this body of
melody, and this “more” has been neglected because it has
not been uncovered to the artistic world. There has been
no study of it outside of the author’s introduction to the
subject printed years ago and a few comments, called
forth by transient phenomena, in the “Tribune” news-
paper in the course of the last generation. This does not
mean that the world has kept silent on the subject. On
the contrary, there has been anything but a dearth of
newspaper and platform talk about songs which the
negroes sang in America when they were slaves, but most
of it has revolved around the questions whether or not
the songs were original creations of these native blacks,
whether or not they were entitled to be called American
and whether or not they were worthy of consideration as
foundation elements for a school of American composition.
The greater part of what has been written was the result
of an agitation which followed Dr. Antonin Dvorak’s
efforts to direct the attention of American composers to
the beauty and efficiency of the material which these
melodies contained for treatment in the higher artistic
forms. Dr. Dvorak’s method was eminently practical;
he composed a symphony, string quartet and string quin-
tet in which he utilized characteristic elements which he
had discovered in the songs of the negroes which had come
to his notice while he was a resident of New York. To
the symphony he gave a title — “From the New World” —
which measurably disclosed his purpose; concerning the
source of his inspiration for the chamber compositions he
said nothing, leaving it to be discovered, as it easily was,
from the spirit, or feeling, of the music and the character
of its melodic and rhythmic idioms. The eminent com-
poser’s aims, as well as his deed, were widely misunderstood
at the time, and, for that matter, still are. They called
[ vi ]
PREFACE
out a clamor from one class of critics which disclosed noth-
ing so much as their want of intelligent discrimination
unless it was their ungenerous and illiberal attitude toward
a body of American citizens to whom at the least must be
credited the creation of a species of song in which an un-
deniably great composer had recognized artistic poten-
tialities thitherto neglected, if not unsuspected, in the land
of its origin. While the critics quarrelled, however, a
group of American musicians acted on Dr. Dvorak’s sug-
gestion, and music in the serious, artistic forms, racy of the
soil from which the slave songs had sprung, was produced
by George W. Chadwick, Henry Schoenberg, Edward R.
Kroeger and others.
It was thus that the question of a possible folksong basis
for a school of composition which the world would recog-
nize as distinctive, even national, was brought upon the
carpet. With that question I am not concerned now. My
immediate concern is to outline the course and method
to be pursued in the investigations which I have under-
taken. Primarily, the study will be directed to the music
of the songs and an attempt be made by comparative
analysis to discover the distinctive idioms of that music,
trace their origins and discuss their correspondences with
characteristic elements of other folk-melodies, and also
their differences.
The burden is to be laid upon the music. The poetry of
the songs has been discussed amply and well, never so
amply or so well as when they were first brought to the
attention of the world by a group of enthusiastic laborers
in the cause of the freedmen during the War of the Re-
bellion. Though foreign travellers had written enthusias-
tically about the singing of the slaves on the Southern
plantations long before, and though the so-called negro
minstrels had provided an admired form of entertainment
based on the songs and dances of the blacks which won
unexampled popularity far beyond the confines of the
United States, the descriptions were vague and general,
the sophistication so great, that it may be said that really
nothing was done to make the specific beauties of the unique
PREFACE
songs of the plantations known until Miss McKim wrote
a letter about them to Dwight’s “Journal of Music,” which
was printed under the date of November 8, 1862.
In August, 1863, H. G. Spaulding contributed some songs
to “The Continental Monthly,” together with an interest-
ing account of how they were sung and the influence which
they exerted upon the singers. In “The Atlantic Monthly”
for June, 1867, Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson
printed the texts of a large number of songs and accom-
panied them with so sympathetic and yet keen an analysis
of their psychology and structure that he left practically
nothing for his successors to say on the subject. Booker
T. Washington and W. E. Burghardt DuBois have only
been able to echo him in strains of higher rhapsody. Much
use was made of these articles by William Francis Allen
in the preface of the first collection of the songs, entitled
“Slave Songs of the United States,” published by A. Simp-
son & Co. in New York in 1867. The observations of these
writers and a few others make up practically the entire sum
of what it is essential to know about the social, literary and
psychological side of the folksongs of the American negroes.
None of these early collectors had more than a smattering
of musical knowledge, and none of them attempted to
subject the melodies of the songs to analytical study.
Outside of the cursory and fragmentary notices of “The
Tribune’s” music reviewer called out by a few performances
of the songs and the appearance of the collections which
followed a popularization of the songs by the singing of the
Jubilee Singers of the Fisk University and other choirs from
the schools established for the higher education of the eman-
cipated blacks, nothing of even a quasi-scientific character
touching the melodies appeared during the last generation
until M. Julien Tiersot, the distinguished librarian of the
Paris Conservatory, published a monograph1 (first in the
Journal of the International Music Society, afterward sep-
arately) giving the results of his investigations into the folk-
music of Canada and the United States made during a
1 “La Musique chez les Peuptes indigenes de l’Amerique du Nord — Etats-
Unis et Canada.” Paris, Librairie Fischbacher; Leipsic and New York, Breit-
kopf & Hartel.
[ viii ]
PREFACE
visit to America in the winter and spring of 1905-1906.
A few months ago a book entitled “Musik, Tanz und
Dichtung bei den Kreolen Amerikas,” by Albert Frie-
denthal, was published in Berlin. M.Tiersot concerned him-
self chiefly with the Indians, though he made some keen
observations on the music of the black Creoles of Louisi-
ana, and glanced also at the slave songs, for which he
formed a sincere admiration; the German folklorist treated
of negro music only as he found it influencing the dances
of the people of Mexico, Central America, South America
and the West Indies.
The writer of this book, therefore, had to do the work of
a pioneer, and as such will be satisfied if he shall succeed in
making a clearing in which successors abler than he shall
work hereafter.
The scope of my inquiry and the method which I have
pursued may be set forth as follows:
1. First of all it shall be determined what are folksongs, and whether
or not the songs in question conform to a scientific definition in respect of
their origin, their melodic and rhythmical characteristics and their psychology.
2. The question, “Are they American?5* shall be answered.
3. Their intervallic, rhythmical and structural elements will be inquired
into and an effort be made to show that, while their combination into songs
took place in this country, the essential elements came from Africa; in other
words, that, while some of the material is foreign, the product is native; and,
if native, then American.
4. An effort will be made to disprove the theory which has been frequently
advanced that the songs are not original creations of the slaves, but only the
fruit of the negro’s innate faculty for imitation. It will be shown that some
of the melodies have peculiarities of scale and structure which could not
possibly have been copied from the music w'hich the blacks were privileged
to hear on the plantations or anywhere else during the period of slavery.
Correspondence will be disclosed, however, between these peculiarities and
elements observed by travellers in African countries.
5. This will necessitate an excursion into the field of primitive African
music and also into the philosophy underlying the conservation of savage
music. Does it follow that, because the American negroes have forgotten
the language of their savage ancestors, they have also forgotten all of their
music? May relics of that music not remain in a subconscious memory?
6. The influences of the music of the dominant peoples with whom the
slaves were brought into contact upon the rude art of the latter will have to
be looked into and also the reciprocal effect upon each other; and thus the
character and nature of the hybrid art found in the Creole songs and dances
of Louisiana will be disclosed.
To make the exposition and arrangement plain, I shall
illustrate them by musical examples. African music will
t « i
PREFACE
be brought forward to show the sources of idioms which
have come over into the folksongs created by negroes in
America; and the effect of these idioms will be demonstrated
by specimens of song collected in the former slave States,
the Bahamas and Martinique. Though for scientific
reasons I should have preferred to present the melodies
of these songs without embellishment of any sort, I have
yielded to a desire to make their peculiar beauty and use-
fulness known to a wide circle of amateurs, and presented
them in arrangements suitable for performance under ar-
tistic conditions.
For these arrangements I am deeply beholden to Henry
T. Burleigh, Arthur Mees, Henry Holden Huss and John
A. Van Broekhoven. An obligation of gratitude is also
acknowledged to Mr. Ogden Mills Reid, Editor of “The
New York Tribune,” for his consent to the reprinting of the
essays; to Mr. George W. Cable and The Century Company
for permission to use some of the material in two of the
former’s essays on Creole Songs and Dances published in
1886 in “The Century Magazine;” and to Professor
Charles L. Edwards, the American Folk-Lore Society, Miss
Emily Hallowell and Harper & Brothers for like privileges.
H. E. Krehbiel.
Blue Hilly Me.
Summer of 1913.
CONTENTS
Preface
Chapter I. Folksongs in General
The Characteristics of Folksongs. — Folksongs De-
fined.— Creative Influences. — Folksong and Suffering.
— Modes, Rhythms and Scales. — Russian and Finnish
Music. — Persistency of Type. — Music and Racial Ties.
— Britons and Bretons.
Chapter II. Songs of the American Slaves
Originality of the Afro-American Folksongs. — Dr.
Wallaschek and His Contention. — Extent of the Imi-
tation in the Songs. — Allusions to Slavery. — How the
Songs Grew. — Are They Entitled to be Called Ameri-
can.— The Negro in American History.
Chapter III. Religious Character of the Songs
The Paucity of Secular Songs among the Slaves. —
Campmeetings, “Spirituals” and “Shouts.” — Work-
Songs of the Fields and Rivers. — Lafcadio Hearn and
Negro Music. — African Relics and Voodoo Ceremonies.
Chapter IV. Modal Characteristics of the Songs
An Analysis of Half a Thousand Negro Songs. —
Division as to Modes. — Overwhelming Prevalence of
Major. — Psychology of the Phenomenon. — Music as a
Stimulus to Work. — Songs of the Fieldhands and Rowers.
Chapter V. Music Among the Africans
The Many and Varied Kinds of African Slaves. —
Not All Negroes. — Their Aptitude and Love for Music.
— Knowledge and Use of Harmony. — Dahomans at
Chicago. — Rhythm and Drumming. — African Instru-
ments.
Chapter VI. Variations from the Major Scale
Peculiarities of Negro Singing. — Vagueness of Pitch
in Certain Intervals. — Fractional Tones in Primitive
Music. — The Pentatonic Scale. — The Flat Seventh. —
Harmonization of Negro Melodies.
Chapter VII. Minor Variations and Characteristic Rhythms
Vagaries in the Minor Scale. — The Sharp Sixth. —
Orientalism. — The “Scotch” Snap/ — A Note on the
Tango Dance. — Even and Uneven Measures. — Ad-
justing Words and Music.
[ xi ]
PAGE
V
1
11
26
42
56
70
83
CONTENTS — Continued
Chapter VIII. Structural Features of the Poems. Funeral
Music 100
Improvization. — Solo and Choral Refrain. — Strange
Funeral Customs. — Their Savage Prototypes. — Mes-
sages to the Dead. — Graveyard Songs of the American
Slaves.
Chapter IX. Dances of the American Negroes 112
Creole Music. — The Effect of Spanish Influences. —
Obscenity of Native African Dances. — Relics in the
Antilles. — The Habanera. — Dance-Tunes from Mar-
tinique.
Chapter X. Songs of the Black Creoles 127
The Language of the Afro-American Folksongs. —
Phonetic Changes in English. — Grammar of the
Creole Patois. — Making French Compact and Musi-
cal— Dr. Mercier’s Pamphlet. — Creole Love-Songs.
Chapter XI. Satirical Songs of the Creoles 140
A Classification of Slave Songs. — The Use of Music
in Satire. — African Minstrels. — The Carnival in Mar-
tinique.— West Indian Pillards. — Old Boscoyo’s Song
in New Orleans. — Conclusion. — An American School
of Composition.
Appendix of Ten Characteristic Songs 157
Index 171
[ xii ]
CHAPTER I
FOLKSONGS IN GENERAL
The Characteristics of Folksongs — Folksongs De-
fined— Creative Influences — Folksong and
Suffering — Modes, Rhythms and Scales —
Russian and Finnish Music — Persistency
of Type — Music and Racial Ties —
Britons and Bretons
The purpose of this book is to study the origin and nature
of what its title calls Afro-American Folksongs. To fore-
fend, as far as it is possible to do so, against misconceptions
it will be well to have an understanding at the outset as
to terms and aims. It is essential, not only to an under-
standing of the argument but also to a necessary limitation
of the scope of the investigation, that the term “folksong”
be defined. The definition must not include too much
lest, at the last, it prove to compass too little. So as far as
possible the method of presentation must be rational and
scientific rather than rhetorical and sentimental, and the
argument be directed straight and unswervingly toward
the establishment of facts concerning a single and distinct
body of song, regardless of any other body even though the
latter be closely related or actually derived from the former.
It is very essential that the word folksong be understood
as having as distinctive a meaning as “folklore,” “myth,”
“legend” or “ Marchen ” — which last word, for the sake of
accuracy, English folklorists have been forced to borrow
from the Germans. It will also be necessary in this ex-
position to appeal to the Germans to enforce a distinction
which is ignored or set aside by the majority of English
writers on folksong — popular writers, that is. The Germans
who write accurately on the subject call what I would
have understood to be folksong das Volkslied; for a larger
body of song, which has community of characteristics with
the folksong but is not of it, they have the term volksthiim-
l 1 1
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
liches Lied. This body of song embraces all vocal com-
positions which have come to be so fondly liked, loved,
admired by the people that they have become a native
and naive popular utterance. So generous, indeed, is the
term that it embraces not only the simple songs based on
genuine folksong texts which musicians have set to music,
and the large number of artistic compositions which imi-
tate the sentiment and structure of folksongs, but also
many lyrics made with conscious art by eminent composers.
In the family circles of Germany and at popular gatherings
one may hear not only Silcher’s setting of “Zu Strassburg
auf der Schanz” (which is music set by an artist to a
folkpoem), but the same composer’s melody to “Ich weiss
nicht, was soil es bedeuten” (an artificial folkpoem by
Heine), Weber’s “Wir winden dir den Jungfernkranz” and
Schubert’s “Am Brunnen vor dem Thore” (which are ar-
tistic products in conception and execution). The English
term “popular song” might well and properly be used as
a synonym for the German term and be applied to the
same kind of songs in English without prejudice to the
scientific “folksong,” were it not for its degraded and de-
grading association with the vulgar music hall ditties.
These ditties, which a wise Providence has cursed with the
blessing of transientness, have companionship in this study
with the so-called “coon songs” and “ragtime tunes” in
which some of the elements of the Afro-American folksongs
are employed.
Only because I cannot see how a paraphrase would im-
prove it in respect of sententiousness, clearness or compre-
hensiveness, I make use of a definition which I wrote a
decade ago for “The Musical Guide” — a dictionary of
terms and much else edited by Rupert Hughes and pub-
lished by McClure, Phillips & Co.:
Folksong is not popular song in the sense in which the word is most fre-
quently used, but the song of the folk; not only the song admired of the people
but, in a strict sense, the song created by the people. It is a body of poetry and
music which has come into existence without the influence of conscious art,
as a spontaneous utterance, filled with characteristic expression of the feelings
of a people. Such songs are marked by certain peculiarities of rhythm, form
and melody which are traceable, more or less clearly, to racial (or national)
temperament, modes of life, climatic and political conditions, geographical
[ 2 ]
FOLKSONGS IN GENERAL
environment and language. Some of these elements, the spiritual, are elusive,
but others can be determined and classified.
Though the present purposes are almost purely musical,
it will be well to consider that in the folksongs of the world
there lies a body of evidence of great value in the study
of many things which enter into the science of ethnology,
such as racial relations, primitive modes of thought,
ancient customs and ancient religions. On this point
something shall be said later.
Folksongs are echoes of the heart-beats of the vast folk,
and in them are preserved feelings, beliefs and habits of
vast antiquity. Not only in the words, which have almost
monopolized folksong study thus far, but also in music, and
perhaps more truthfully in the music than in the words.
Music cannot lie, for the reason that the things which are
at its base, the things without which it could not be, are un-
conscious, unvolitional human products. We act on a
recognition of this fact when we judge of the feelings of
one with whom we are conversing not so much by what he
says to us as by the manner in which he says it. The feel-
ings which sway him publish themselves in the pitch,
dynamic intensity and timbre of his voice. Try as we
may, if we are powerfully moved we cannot conceal the
fact so we open our mouths for utterance. Involuntarily
the muscles of the vocal organs contract or relax in obedi-
ence to an emotional stimulus, and the drama of feeling
playing on the hidden stage of our hearts is betrayed by
the tones which we utter. These tones, without purpose
on our part, have become endowed with the qualities
of gravity and acuteness (pitch), loudness and softness
(dynamics), and emotional color (timbre), and out of the
union and modulation of these elements comes expressive
melody. Herbert Spencer has formulated the law: “Feel-
ings are muscular stimuli” and “Variations of voice are the
physiological results of variations of feeling.” In this lies
the simple explanation of the inherent truthfulness and
expressiveness of the music which a folk creates for itself.
“The folksong composes itself” ( Das Volkslied dichtet
sich selbst ), said Grimm. This is true despite the obvious
[ 3 ]
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
fact that every folksong must once have been the utterance
of an individual. What is meant by the axiom is that the
creator of the folksong is an unindividualized representative
of his people, himself a folk-product. His idioms are taken
off the tongue of the people; his subjects are the things
which make for the joy and sorrow of the people, and once
his song is gone out into the world his identity as its creator
is swallowed up in that of the people. Not only is his
name forgotten, but his song enters at once upon a series of
transformations, which (such is the puissant genius of the
people) adapt it to varying circumstances of time and
place without loss to its vital loveliness. The creator of a
folksong as an individual is a passing phenomenon — like
a wave of the sea. His potentiality is racial or national,
not personal, and for that reason it is enduring, not ephe-
meral. As a necessary corollary it follows that the music
of the folksong reflects the inner life of the people that
gave it birth, and that its characteristics, like the people’s
physical and mental habits, occupations, methods and
feelings are the product of environment, as set forth in the
definition.
If Herbert Spencer’s physiological analysis of the origin
of melody is correct, the finest, because the truest, the
most intimate, folk-music is that provoked by suffering.
The popular mind does not always think so of music. Its
attitude is reflected in the phrase: “Oh, I’m so happy I
could sing all day!” But do we sing when we are happy?
Song, it is true, is a natural expression of the care-free and
light-hearted; but it is oftener an expression of a superficial
than a profound feeling. We leap, run, toss our arms,
indulge in physical action when in an ecstasy of joy; in
sorrow we sit motionless, but, oftener than we are our-
selves conscious of the fact, we seek comfort in song. In
the popular nomenclature of music the symbols of gayety
and gravity are the major and minor moods. It is a
broad characterization, and not strictly correct from a
scientific point of view; but it serves to point a general
rule, the exceptions to which (the Afro-American folk-
songs form one of them) invite interesting speculation.
[ 4 ]
FOLKSONGS IN GENERAL
Comparative analysis of the folksongs of widely distri-
buted countries has shown that some peoples are predis-
posed toward the minor mode, and in some cases explana-
tions of the fact can be found in the geographical, climatic
or political conditions under which these peoples have
lived in the past or are living now. As a general rule, it
will be found that the peoples of high latitudes use the
minor mode rather than the major. A study of one
hundred songs from every one of twenty-two countries
made by Carl Engel,1 discloses that of the six most pre-
dominantly minor countries of Europe five were the most
northern ones, his figures being as follows:
Major Minor Mixed
Sweden 14 80 6
Russia 35 52 13
Norway 40 56 4
Wallachia 40 52 8
Denmark 47 52 1
Finland 58 50 2
Melancholy is thus seen to be the characteristic note
of Scandinavian music, which reflects the gloom of the
fjords and forests and fearful winters of the northern
peninsula, where nature makes human life a struggle and
death an ever-present though not necessarily terrifying
contemplation.
That geographical and climatic conditions are not the
only determining factors in the choice of modes is evident,
however, from the case of Russia, which extends over
nearly 30 degrees of latitude and has so great a variety of
climate that the statement that the mean temperature
varies from 32 degrees Fahrenheit at Archangel to 58 de-
grees at Kutais in the Caucasus, conveys only an imperfect
notion of the climatic variability of the country. Yet
the minor mode is dominant even in the Ukraine.
If an attempt were made, therefore, to divide Europe
into major and minor by drawing a line across the map
from west to east along the parallel of the 50th degree of
latitude the rule would become inoperative as soon as the
Russian border was reached. Thence the isomodal line
would take a sharp southward trend of no less than 15
1 See his “Introduction to the Study of National Music.”
[ s ]
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
degrees. All Russia is minor; and Russian folksong,
I am prone to think, is the most moving and beautiful
folk-music in the world. Other influences than the ordinary
are therefore at work here, and their discovery need not
detain the reader’s mind long. Suffering is suffering,
whether it be physical or spiritual, whether it spring from
the unfriendliness of nature or the harshness of political
and social conditions.
While Russian folksong is thus weighted with sorrow,
Russian folkdance is singularly energetic and boisterous.
This 'would seem to present a paradox, but the reason
becomes plain when it is remembered that a measured and
decorous mode of popular amusement is the normal ex-
pression of equable popular life, while wild and desperate
gayety is frequently the reaction from suffering. There
is a gayety of despair as well as of contentment and happi-
ness. Read this from Dr. Norman McLeod’s “Note
Book” :“My father once saw some emigrants from Lochaber
dancing on the deck of an emigrant ship and weeping their
eyes out! This feeling is the mother of Irish music. It
expresses the struggle of a buoyant, merry heart to get
quit of thoughts that often lie too deep for tears. It is the
music of an oppressed, conquered, but deeply feeling, im-
pressible, fanciful and generous people. It is for the harp
in Tara’s halls!”
The rhythms of folksongs may be said to be primarily
the product of folkdances, but as these, as a rule, are in-
spired by the songs which are sung for their regulation,
it follows that there is also a verbal basis for rhythms.
Whether or not this is true of the rhythmical elements
which have entered into Afro-American folksongs cannot
be said, for want of knowledge of the languages spoken by
the peoples (not people, for they were many and of many
kinds) who were brought from Africa to America as slaves.
An analogy for the “snap,” which is the most pervasive
element in the music which came from the Southern plan-
tations (the idiom which has been degraded into “rag-
time”), is found in the folk-music of the Magyars of Hun-
gary; and there it is indubitably a product of the poems.
[ 6 ]
FOLKSONGS IN GENERAL
Intervallic peculiarities are more difficult to explain than
rhythmic, and are in greater likelihood survivals of primi-
tive elements. Despite its widespread use, the diatonic
scale is an artistic or scientific evolution, not an inspiration
or a discovery in the natural world of sound; and though
it may have existed in primitive music before it became the
basis of an art, there was no uniformity in its use. The
most idiomatic music of the Finns, who are an older race
in the northern European peninsula than any of the Ger-
manic tribes which are their rulers, is confined to the first
five tones of the minor scale; old Irish and Scotch songs
share the familiar pentatonic scale (by which I mean the
modern diatonic series omitting the fourth and seventh
steps) with the popular music of China, Japan, Siam and
other countries. It is of frequent occurrence in the melodies
of the American negroes, and found not infrequently in
those of North American Indians; it is probably the oldest
tonal system in the world and the most widely dispersed.
Cesar Cui remarks the prevalence in Russia of two
major scales, one without the fourth and the other without
the third and seventh. Hungarian melodies employ largely
the interval called an augmented, or superfluous, second,
which is composed of three semitones. The Magyars are
Scythians and racially related to the Finns and Turks, and
not to their neighbors, the Poles and Russians; yet the
same peculiarity is found in Slavic music — in the songs
of the Serbs, Bulgarians, Montenegrins and all the other
mixed peoples that inhabit the Balkan Peninsula. The
idiom is Oriental and a marked feature of the popular
and synagogal music of the Jews.
Facts like tj^ese indicate the possibility of employing
folksong as an aid in the determination of ethnological and
ethnographical questions; for its elements have a marvellous
tenacity of life. Let this be remembered when the specific
study of American folksong is attempted. The persistency
of a type of song in spite of a change of environment of
sufficient influence to modify the civilization of a people
has a convincing illustration in Finland. Though the Finns
have mixed with their Germanic neighbors for many
[ 7 ]
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
centuries, there was originally no affinity of race between
them and their conquerors. Their origin is in doubt, but
it is supposed that they are Mongols and therefore relatives
of the Magyars. The influence of the Swedes upon their
culture began in the twelfth century, when Christianity
was forced upon them, and it has never ceased, though
Sweden was compelled by the allied powers to cede Finland
to Russia in 1809. Now Russia, though she signed a solemn
pact to permit the liberty of language, education and
religion to the Finns, is engaged in stamping out the last
vestiges of nationalism in the country so beautifully called
Suomi by its people.
The active cultivation of music as an art in the modern
sense began in Finland toward the close of the eighteenth
century, and the composers, directors and teachers were
either Germans or Scandinavians educated in Germany.
The artistic music of the Finns, therefore, is identified as
closely as possible with that of the Scandinavian people,
though it has of late received something of a Russian im-
press; but the vigor and power of primitive influences is
attested by the unmistakable elements in the Finnish
folksongs. The ancient Finns had the Northern love for
music, and their legendary Orpheus was even a more
picturesque and potent theurgist than the Greek. His
name was Wainamoinen, and when he
— tuned his lyre with pleasing woe,
Rivers forgot to run, and winds to blow;
While listening forests covered, as he played,
The soft musician in a moving shade.
To Wainamoinen was attributed the invention of the
kantele , a harp which originally had five strings tuned to
the notes which, as has been said, are the basis of the
Finnish songs, especially those called runo songs, which are
still sung. The five-four time which modern composers are
now affecting (as is seen in the second movement of
Tschaikowsky’s “Pathetic” symphony) is an element of
the meter of the national Finnish epic, the “Kalevala,”
whence Longfellow borrowed it for his American epic,
“Hiawatha.” It, too, is found in many runo songs.
[ 8 ]
FOLKSONGS IN GENERAL
Music is a marvellous conservator. One reason of this
is that it is the most efficient of all memory-helps. Another
is that among primitive peoples all over the world music
became associated with religious worship at so early a
period in the development of religion that it acquired even
a greater sanctity than words or eucharistic posturing.
So the early secular song, as well as the early sacred, is
sometimes preserved long after its meaning is forgotten.
In this particular, too, folksong becomes an adjunct to
ethnology. A striking story is told of how in the middle
of the eighteenth century a folksong established fraternal
relations between two peoples who had forgotten for cen-
turies that they were of one blood. The tale comes from
a French book,1 but is thus related in an essay on “Some
Breton Folksongs,” published by Theodore Bacon in “The
Atlantic Monthly” for November, 1892:
In September, 1758, an English force effected a descent
upon the Breton coast, at Saint-Cast. A company of
Lower Bretons, from the neighborhood of Treguire and
Saint-Pol de Leon, was marching against a detachment
of Welsh mountaineers, which was coming briskly forward
singing a national air, when all at once the Bretons of the
French army stopped short in amazement. The air their
enemies were singing was one which every day may be
heard sounding over the hearths of Brittany. “Electrified,”
says the historian, grandson himself of an eyewitness,
“by accents which spoke to their hearts, they gave way to
a sudden enthusiasm, and joined in the same patriotic
refrain. The Welsh, in their turn, stood motionless in their
ranks. On both sides officers gave the command to fire;
but it was in the same language, and the soldiers stood as
if petrified. This hesitation continued, however, but a
moment: a common emotion was too strong for discipline;
the weapons fell from their hands, and the descendants
from the ancient Celts renewed upon the battlefield the
fraternal ties which had formerly united their fathers.”
M. Th. Hersart de la Villemarque, in his “Barzaz-
Breiz,” a collection of Breton folksongs, prints two ballads,
1 “Combat de Saint-Cast, par M. de Saint-Pern Couelan,” 1836.
t 9 ]
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
in one of which the battle of Saint-Cast is celebrated, to-
gether with two other repulses of English invaders of the
Breton coast (at Camaret, in i486, and Guidel, in 1694).
Concerning the encounter at Saint-Cast Villemarque ad-
vances the theory that the singers were the French sol-
diers, and that the reason why the Welshmen stopped in
amazement was that they suspected treachery when they
heard their own song. The point is of little consequence,
but not so the melody which Villemarque prints as that to
which the old ballad is sung. This, as it appears in “Bar-
zaz-Breiz,” is, note for note, the Welsh tune known as
“Captain Morgan’s March.” The same melody is sung
to another ballad describing the siege of Guingamp, which
took place in 1488. Now, according to Welsh legend, the
Morgan whose name is preserved in the ancient Rhyfel-
gyrch Cadpen Morgan was “Captain of the Glamorganshire
men, about the year 1294, who gallantly defended his
country from the incursion of the Saxons and who dis-
possessed the Earl of Gloucester of those lands which had
formerly been taken from Morgan’s forefathers.” If the
air is as old as that it may well be older still, and, indeed,
may have been carried into ancient Armorica by the immi-
grants from Great Britain who crossed the Channel in
large numbers in the fifth and sixth centuries. Other relics
of their earlier home besides those of language survive
among the people of lower Brittany. Had the soldiers
at Saint-Cast sat down together and regaled each other
with hero legend and fairy tale they would have found
that Arthur and Merlin and the korrigan (little fairies)
were their common glory and delight. “King Arthur is
not dead!” may be heard in Brittany to-day as often as in
Cornwall. Moreover, the Welsh song which is sung to the
tune of “Captain Morgan’s March” and the Breton ballad
“Emgann Sant-Kast”1 have one vigorous sentiment in
common: “Cursed be the Saxon!”
1 See Appendix.
[ 10 ]
CHAPTER II
SONGS OF THE AMERICAN SLAVES
Originality of the Afro-American Folksongs —
Dr. Wallaschek and his Contention — Extent
of Imitations in the Songs — Allusions
to Slavery — How the Songs Grew —
Are They Entitled to be Called
American ? — The Negro in
American History.
It would never have occurred to me to undertake to
prove the existence of genuine folksongs in America, and
those the songs which were created by the black slaves of
the Southern States, if the fact of such existence had not
been denied by at least one writer who has affected the
scientific manner, and had it not become the habit of a cer-
tain class of writers in this country, while conceding the
interesting character of the songs, to refuse them the right
to be called American. A foolish pride on the part of one
class of Americans of more or less remote English ancestry,
and a more easily understood and more pardonable pre-
judice on the part of former slaveholders and their descend-
ants, might explain this attitude in New England and the
South, but why a foreign writer, with whom a personal
equation should not have been in any degree operative,
should have gone out of his way to pronounce against the
originality of the songs of the American negroes, cannot
be so readily understood. Yet, in his book, “Primitive
Music,”1 Dr. Richard Wallaschek says:
There still remains to be mentioned one race which is spread all over
America and whose musical powers have attracted the attention of many
Europeans — the negro race. It may seem inappropriate to treat of the
negroes in this place, but it is of their capabilities under the influence of
culture that I wish to make a few remarks. I think I may say that, generally
speaking, these negro songs are very much overrated, and that, as a rule, they
are mere imitations of European compositions which the negroes have picked
up and served up again with slight variations. Moreover, it is a remarkable
1“An Inquiry into the Origin and Development of Music, Songs, Instru-
ments, Dances and Pantomines of Savage Races” (London, 1893).
[ 11 ]
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
fact that one author has frequently copied his praise of negro songs from
another, and determined from it the great capabilities of the blacks, when a
closer examination would have revealed the fact that they were not musical
songs at all, but merely simple poems. This is undoubtedly the case with
the oft quoted negro songs of Day and Busch. The latter declares that the
lucrative business which negroes made by singing their songs in the streets
of* American towns determined the whites to imitate them, and with black-
ened faces to perform their own “compositions” as negro songs. We must
be on our guard against the selections of so-called negro songs, which are
often offered us as negro compositions.
Miss McKim and Mr. Spaulding were the first to try to make negro
songs known, the former of whom, in connection with Allen and Ware, pub-
lished a large collection which for the most part had been got together by the
negroes of Coffin’s point and in the neighboring plantations at St. Helena.
I cannot think that these and the rest of the songs deserve the praise given
by the editors, for they are unmistakably “arranged” — not to say ignorantly
borrowed — from the national songs of all nations, from military signals,
well-known marches, German student songs, etc., unless it is pure accident
which has caused me to light upon traces of so many of them. Miss McKim
herself says it is difficult to reproduce in notes their peculiar guttural sounds
and rhythmical effects — almost as difficult, in fact as with the songs of
birds or the tones of an seolian harp. “Still, the greater part of negro music
is civilized in its character,” sometimes influenced by the whites, sometimes
directly imitated. After this we may forego the necessity for a thorough
examination, although it must be mentioned here, because the songs are so
often given without more ado as examples of primitive music. It is, as a matter
of fact, no longer primitive, even in its wealth of borrowed melody. Feeling
for harmony seems fairly developed.
It was not Miss McKim, but Mr. Allen, who called
attention to the “civilized” character of the music of the
slaves. In what Miss McKim said about the difficulty
of reproducing “the entire character” of the music, as she
expresses it, by the conventional symbols of the art, she
adduces a proof of the primitive nature of some of its
elements. The study of these elements might profitably
have occupied Dr. Wallaschek’s attention for a space.
Had he made more than cursory examination of them he
would not have been so sweeping in his characterization
of the songs as mere imitations. The authors whom he
quotes1 wrote before a collection of songs of the American
negroes had been made on which a scientific, critical opin-
ion might be based. As for Dr. Wallaschek, his critical
attitude toward “Slave Songs” is amply shown by his
bracketing it with a publication of Christy minstrel songs
which appeared in London; his method is illustrated by
1Charles William Day, who published a work entitled “Five Years’
Residence in the West Indies,” in 1852, and Moritz Busch, who in 1854 pub-
lished his “Wanderungen zwischen Hudson und Mississippi.”
[ 12 ]
SONGS OF THE AMERICAN SLAVES
his acceptance in his resume of the observations of travel-
lers among savage peoples (an extremely helpful book
otherwise) of their terminology as well as their opinions
in musical matters. Now, nothing is more notorious than
that the overwhelming majority of the travellers who have
written about primitive peoples have been destitute of
even the most elemental knowledge of practical as well
as theoretical music; yet without some knowledge of the
art it is impossible even to give an intelligent description
of the rudest musical instruments. The phenomenon is
not peculiar to African travellers, though the confusion
of terms and opinions is greater, perhaps, in books on
Africa than anywhere else. Dr. Wallaschek did not per-
mit the fact to embarrass him in the least, nor did he even
attempt to set the writers straight so far as properly to
classify the instruments which they describe. All kinds
of instruments of the stringed kind are jumbled higgledy-
piggledy in these descriptions, regardless of whether or
not they had fingerboards or belonged to the harp family;
bamboo instruments are called flutes, even if they are
sounded by being struck; wooden gongs are permitted to
parade as drums, and the universal “whizzer,” or “buzzer”
(a bit of flat wood attached to a string and made to give
a whirring sound by being whirled through the air) is
treated even by Dr. Wallaschek as if it were an seolian
harp. A common African instrument of rhythm, a stick
with one edge notched like a saw, over which another
stick is rubbed, which has its counterpart in Louisiana in
the jawbone and key, is discussed as if it belonged to the
viol family, simply because it is rubbed. He does not
challenge even so infantile a statement as that of Captain
John Smith when he asserts that the natives of Virginia
had “bass, tenor, counter-tenor, alto and soprano rattles.”
And so on. These things may not influence Dr. Walla-
schek’s deductions, but they betoken a carelessness of
mind which should not exist in a scientific investigator, and
justify a challenge of his statement that the songs of the
American negroes are predominantly borrowings from
European music.
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
Besides, the utterance is illogical. Similarities exist
between the folksongs of all peoples. Their overlapping is
a necessary consequence of the proximity and intermingling
of peoples, like modifications of language; and there are
some characteristics which all songs except those of the
rudest and most primitive kind must have in common.
The prevalence of the diatonic scales and the existence
of march-rhythms, for instance, make parallels unavoidable.
If the use of such scales and rhythms in the folksongs of the
American negroes is an evidence of plagiarism or imitation,
it is to be feared that the peoples whose music they put
under tribute have been equally culpable with them.
Again, if the songs are but copies of “the national songs
of all nations, military signals, well-known marches, Ger-
man student songs, etc.,” why did white men blacken
their faces and imitate these imitations ? Were the facilities
of the slaves to hear all these varieties of foreign music
better than those of their white imitators? It is plain that
Dr. Wallaschek never took the trouble to acquaint himself
with the environment of the black slaves in the United
States. How much music containing the exotic elements
which I have found in some songs, and which I shall pres-
ently discuss, ever penetrated to the plantations where
these songs grew? It did not need Dr. Wallaschek’s con-
fession that he did not think it necessary to make a thorough
examination of even the one genuine collection which
came under his notice to demonstrate that he did not look
analytically at the songs as a professedly scientific man
should have done before publishing his wholesale charac-
terization and condemnation. This characterization is
of a piece with his statement that musical contests which
he mentions of the Nishian women which are “won by the
woman who sings loudest and longest” are “still in use
in America,” which precious piece of intelligence he proves
by relating a newspaper story about a pianoforte play-
ing match in a dime museum in New York in 1892. The
truth is that, like many another complacent German savant,
Dr. Wallaschek thinks Americans are barbarians. He is
welcome to his opinion, which can harm no one but himself.
SONGS OF THE AMERICAN SLAVES
That there should be resemblances between some of the
songs sung by the American blacks and popular songs of
other origin need surprise no one. In the remark about
civilized music made by Mr. Allen, which Dr. Wallaschek
attributes to Miss McKim, it is admitted that the music
of the negroes is “partly actually imitated from their
music,” i. e., the music of the whites; but Mr. Allen adds:
“In the main it appears to be original in the best sense
of the word, and the more we examine the subject, the
more genuine it appears to be. In a very few songs, as
Nos. 19, 23 and 25, strains of familiar tunes are readily
traced; and it may easily be that others contain strains
of less familiar music which the slaves heard their masters
sing or play.” It would be singular, indeed, if this were
not the case, for it is a universal law. Of the songs singled
out by Mr. Allen, No. 19 echoes what Mr. Allen describes
as a familiar Methodist hymn, ‘Ain’t I glad I got out of
the Wilderness,’ ” but he admits that it may be original. I
have never seen the song in a collection of Methodist
hymns, but I am certain that I used to sing it as a boy to
words which were anything but religious. Moreover, the
second period of the tune, the only part that is in con-
troversy, has a prototype of great dignity and classic
ancestry; it is the theme of the first Allegro of Bach’s
sonata in E for violin and clavier. I know of no parallel
for No. 23 (“I saw the Beam in my Sister’s eye”) except
in other negro songs. The second period of No. 23 (“Gwine
Follow”), as Mr. Allen observes, “is evidently ‘Buffalo,’
variously known as ‘Charleston’ or ‘Baltimore Gals.’ ”
But who made the tune for the £‘gals” of Buffalo, Charleston
and Baltimore? The melodies which were more direct
progenitors of the songs which Christy’s Minstrels and
other minstrel companies carried all over the land were
attributed to the Southern negroes; songs like “Coal-
black Rose,” “Zip Coon” and “Ole Virginny Nebber
Tire,” have always been accepted as the creations of the
blacks, though I do not know whether or not they really
are. Concerning them I am skeptical, to say the least,
if only for the reason that we have no evidence on the sub-
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
ject. So-called negro songs are more than a century old
in the music-rooms of America. A song descriptive of the
battle of Plattsburg was sung in a drama to words supposed-
ly in negro dialect, as long ago as 1815. “Jump Jim
Crow” was caught by Thomas D. (“Daddy”) Rice from
the singing and dancing of an old, deformed and decrepit
negro slave in Louisville eighty-five years ago (if the best
evidence obtainable on the subject is to be believed), and
this was the starting-point of negro minstrelsy of the
Christy type. “Dandy Jim of Caroline” may also have
had a negro origin; I do not know, and the question is
inconsequential here for the reason that the Afro-American
folksongs which I am trying to study owe absolutely
nothing to the songs which the stage impersonators of
the negro slave made popular in the United States and
England. They belong to an entirely different order of
creations. For one thing, they are predominantly re-
ligious songs; it is a singular fact that very few secular
songs — those which are referred to as “reel tunes,” “fiddle
songs,” “corn songs” and “devil songs,” for which the
slaves generally expressed a deep abhorrence, though
many of them, no doubt, were used to stimulate them while
at work in the fields — have been preserved, while “shout
songs” and other “speritchils” (spirituals — “ballets” they
were called at a later day) have been kept alive by the
hundreds. The explanation of the phenomenon is psy-
chological.
There are a few other resemblances which may be
looked into. “Who is on the Lord’s side?”1 may have
suggested the notion of “military calls” to Dr. Wallaschek.
“In Bright Mansions Above”2 contains a phrase which
may have been inspired by “The Wearing of the Green.”
A palpable likeness to “Camptown Races” exists in “Lord,
Remember Me.”3 Stephen C. Foster wrote “Camp-
town Races” in 1850; the book called “Slave Songs of the
United States” was published in 1867, but the songs were
collected several years before. I have no desire to rob
1 “Slave Songs,” No. 75.
2 No. 78 of the Fisk Jubilee Collection.
3 No. 7 in “Slave Songs.”
[ 16 ]
SONGS OF THE AMERICAN SLAVES
Foster of the credit of having written the melody of his
song; he would have felt justified had he taken it from the
lips of a slave, but it is more than likely that he invented
it and that it was borrowed in part for a hymn by the
negroes. The “spirituals” are much sophisticated with
worldly sentiment and phrase.
There are -surprisingly few references to the servitude
of the blacks in their folksongs which can be traced to
ante-bellum days. The text of “Mother, is Massa Gwine
to sell us To-morrow?” would seem to be one of these;
but it is not in the earliest collection and may be of later
date in spite of its sentiment. I present three interesting
examples which celebrate the deliverance from slavery,
of which two, “Many Thousands Gone”1 and “Many
Thousand Go”2 are obviously musical variants of the
same song (see pages 18, 19, 20). Colonel Higginson, who
collected the second, says of it in his “Atlantic Monthly”
essay: “They had another song to which the Rebellion
had actually given rise. This was composed by nobody
knew whom — though it was the most recent, doubtless,
of all these ‘spirituals’ — and had been sung in secret to
avoid detection. It is certainly plaintive enough. The
peck of corn and pint of salt were slavery’s rations.” The
editors of “Slave Songs” add: “Lieutenant-Colonel Trow-
bridge learned that it was first sung when Beauregard took
the slaves to the islands to build the fortifications at
Hilton Head and Bay Point.” The third song, “Done wid
Driber’s Bribin’,” was first printed in Mr. H. G. Spauld-
ing’s essay “Under the Palmetto” in the “Continental
Monthly” for August, 1863. The song “Oh, Freedom over
Me,” which Dr. Burghardt du Bois quotes in his “The
Souls of Black Folk” as an expression of longing for
deliverance from slavery encouraged by fugitive slaves
and the agitation of free negro leaders before the War of the
Rebellion, challenges no interest for its musical contents,
since it is a compound of two white men’s tunes — “Lily
Dale,” a sentimental ditty, and “The Battle-Cry of Free-
dom,” a patriotic song composed by George F. Root, in
1 Fisk Jubilee Collection, No. 23.
2 “Slave Songs,” No. 64.
[ 17 ]
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
THREE EMANCIPATION SONGS
I. Words and Melody from “Slave Songs of the
United States”; — II. From “The Continental Month-
ly” of August, 1863, reprinted in “Slave Songs”; —
III. From “The Story of the Jubilee Singers.” The
arrangements are by H. T. Burleigh.
Many Thousand Go
I
2. No more drivers lash for me. 4. No more hundred lash for me.
3. No more pint o’ salt forme. 5. No more mistress’ call forme.
f 18 ]
SONGS OF THE AMERICAN SLAVES
Done wid Driber’s Bribin’
n
2. Done wid Massa’s hollerin’,
Done wid Massa’s hollerin’,
Bone wid Massa’s hollerin’;
Roll, Jordan, roll.
3. Done wid Missus’ scoldin’,
Done wid MissusKscoldin’,
Done wid Missus' scoldin’;
Roll, Jordan, roll.
I 19 i
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
Many Thousands Gone
in
2. No more peck o' com, etc. 4L No more pint o’ salt, etc.
3. No more driver’s lash, etc. 5. No more hundred lash, etc.
6. No more mistress’ call, etc.
[ 20 ]
SONGS OF THE AMERICAN SLAVES
Chicago, and inspired by President Lincoln’s second call
for volunteers in the summer of 1861. There was time
for the negro song to have grown up between 1861 and the
emancipation of the slaves, but it is not likely that slaves
anywhere in the United States outside of the lines of
the Federal armies would have dared to sing
O Freedom, O Freedom,
O Freedom over me!
Before I’ll be a slave,
I’ll be buried in my grave.
And go home to my Lord,
And be free!
before 1863. Besides, the song did not appear in print, I
believe, till it was published in “Religious Folk Songs of the
Negro, as Sung on the Plantations,” an edition of “Cabin
and Plantation Songs as Sung by the Hampton Students,”
published in 1909. The early editions of the book knew
nothing of the song. Colonel Higginson quotes a song
with a burden of “We’ll soon be free,” for singing which
negroes had been put in jail at the outbreak of the Rebel-
lion in Georgetown, S. C. In spite of the obviously appar-
ent sentiment, Colonel Higginson says it had no reference
to slavery, though he thinks it may have been sung
“with redoubled emphasis during the new events.” It
was, in fact, a song of hoped-for deliverance from the
sufferings of this world and of anticipation of the joys
of Paradise, where the faithful were to “walk de miry
road” and “de golden streets,” on which pathways
“pleasure never dies.” No doubt there was to the singers
a hidden allegorical significance in the numerous allusions
to the deliverance of the Israelites from Egyptian bondage
contained in the songs, and some of this significance may
have crept into the songs before the day of freedom
began to dawn. A line, “The Lord will call us home,”
in the song just referred to, Colonel Higginson says “was
evidently thought to be a symbolical verse; for, as a little
drummer-boy explained to me, showing all his white teeth
as he sat in the moonlight by the door of my tent, ‘Dey
tink de Lord mean for say de Yankees.’ ”
If the songs which came from the plantations of the
[ 21 ]
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
South are to conform to the scientific definition of folksongs
as I laid it down in the preceding chapter, they must be
“born, not made;” they must be spontaneous utterances
of the people who originally sang them; they must also
be the fruit of the creative capacity of a whole and in-
genuous people, not of individual artists, and give voice
to the joys, sorrows and aspirations of that people. They
must betray the influences of the environment in which
they sprang up, and may preserve relics of the likes and
aptitudes of their creators when in the earlier environment
from which they emerged. The best of them must be felt
by the singers themselves to be emotional utterances.
The only considerable body of song which has come into
existence in the territory now compassed by the United
States, I might even say in North America, excepting
the primitive songs of the Indians (which present an en-
tirely different aspect), are the songs of the former black
slaves. In Canada the songs of the people, or that portion
of the people that can be said still to sing from impulse,
are predominantly French, not only in language but in
subject. They were for the greater part transferred to
this continent with the bodily integrity which they now
possess. Only a small portion show an admixture of In-
dian elements; but the songs of the black slaves of the
South are original and native products. They contain
idioms which were transplanted hither from Africa, but
as songs they are the product of American institutions;
of the social, political and geographical environment within
which their creators were placed in America; of the in-
fluences to which they were subjected in America; of the
joys, sorrows and experiences which fell to their lot in
America.
Nowhere save on the plantations of the South could
the emotional life which is essential to the development
of true folksong be developed; nowhere else was there the
necessary meeting of the spiritual cause and the simple
agent and vehicle. The white inhabitants of the continent
have never been in the state of cultural ingenuousness
which prompts spontaneous emotional utterance in music.
[ 22 ]
SONGS OF THE AMERICAN SLAVES
Civilization atrophies the faculty which creates this
phenomenon as it does the creation of myth and legend.
Sometimes the faculty is galvanized into life by vast cala-
mities or crises which shake all the fibres of social and
national existence; and then we see its fruits in the compo-
sitions of popular musicians. Thus the War of the Rebel-
lion produced songs markedly imbued with the spirit of
folksong, like “The Battle-Cry of Freedom,” “Tramp,
Tramp, Tramp, the Boys are Marching,” and “Marching
Through Georgia.” But it is a singular fact that the
patriotic songs of the American people during the War of
the Revolution and the War of 1812 were literary and
musical parodies of English songs. We took the music of
“Yankee Doodle” and “The Star-Spangled Banner” from
the lips of the enemy.
It did not lie in the nature of the mill life of New England
or the segregated agricultural life of the Western pioneers
to inspire folksongs; those occupations lacked the romantic
and emotional elements which existed in the slave life of
the plantations in the South and which invited celebration
in song — grave and gay. Nor were the people of the North
possessed of the ingenuous, native musical capacity of the
Southern blacks.
It is in the nature of things that the origin of individual
folksongs should as a rule remain unknown; but we have
evidence to show how some of them grew, and from it we
deduce the general rule as it has been laid down. Colonel
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, in his delightful essay
“Negro Spirituals,” published in “The Atlantic Monthly”
for June, 1867, tells an illuminative anecdote. Speaking
of “No More Peck of Corn for Me,” he says:
Even of this last composition, however, we have only the approximate
date, and know nothing of the mode of composition. Allen Ramsey says of
the Scotch songs that, no matter who made them, they were soon attributed
to the minister of the parish whence they sprang. And I always wondered,
about these, whether they had always a conscious and definite origin in some
leading mind or whether they grew by gradual accretion in an almost un-
conscious way. On this point I could get no information, though I asked
many questions, until at last one day when I was being rowed across from
Beaufort to Ladies’ Island, I found myself, with delight, on the actual trail
of a song. One of the oarsmen, a brisk young fellow, not a soldier, on being
asked for his theory of the matter, dropped out a coy confession. “Some good
sperituals,” he said, “are start jest out o’ curiosity. I bin a-raise a sing myself
once.”
[ 23 ]
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
My dream was fulfilled, and I had traced out not the poem alone, but the
poet. I implored him to proceed.
“Once we boys went for tote some rice, and de nigger driver, he keep a-
callin’ on us: and I say, ‘O, de ole nigger driver!” Den anudder said, ‘Fust
t’ing my mammy tole me was not’in’ so bad as a nigger driver.’ Den I made
a sing, just puttin’ a word and den anudder word.”
Then he began singing and the men, after listening a moment, joined in the
chorus as if it were an old acquaintance, though they evidently had never
heard it before. I saw how easily a new “sing” took root among them.
“O, de ole nigger driver!
O, gwine away!
Fust t’ing my mammy tell me.
O, gwine away!
Tell me ’bout de nigger driver,
O, gwine away!
Nigger driver second devil,
O, gwine away!
Best t’ing for do he driver,
O, gwine away!
Knock he down and spoil he labor —
O, gwine away!”
A similar story, which also throws light on the emanci-
pation songs which I have printed, was told by J. Miller
McKim in an address delivered in Philadelphia on July
9, 1862:
I asked one of these blacks, one of the most intelligent of them, where they
got these songs.
“Dey make ’em, sah.”
“How do they make them?”
After a pause, evidently casting about for an explanation, he said:
“I’ll tell you; it’s dis way: My master call me up an’ order me a short peck
of corn and a hundred lash. My friends see it and is sorry for me. When dey
come to de praise meeting dat night dey sing about it. Some’s very good
singers and know how; and dey work it in, work it in, you know, till dey get
it right; and dat’s de way.”
“In ancient Rome sick slaves were exposed on the island
of Aesculapius, in the Tiber; by a decree of Claudius slaves
so exposed could not be reclaimed by their master.” —
(Encyclopaedia Britannica, art. “Slavery.”)
An incident which gave rise in Jamaica to a folksong,
which is a remarkably fine example of dramatic directness
and forcefulness, but of which, most unfortunately, the
music has not been preserved, recalls this ancient regu-
lation. Here is the song:
“Take him to the gully! Take him to the gully,
But bringee back the frock and the board.”
“O massa, massa! Me no deadee yet!”
“Take him to the gully! Take him to the gully;
Carry him along!”
How this song came into existence is thus related in
[ 24 1
SONGS OF THE AMERICAN SLAVES
“A Journal of a Residence Among the Negroes in the
West Indies,” by Matthew Gregory Lewis:1
The song alludes to a transaction which took place about fifty years ago
on an estate called Spring Garden, the owner of which is quoted as the crudest
proprietor that ever disgraced Jamaica. It was his constant practice, when-
ever a sick negro was pronounced incurable, to order the poor wretch to be
carried to a solitary vale upon his estate, called the Gully, where he was thrown
down and abandoned to his fate — which fate was generally to be half-de-
voured by the john crows before death had put an end to his sufferings. By
this proceeding the avaricious owner avoided the expense of maintaining
the slave during his last illness; and in order that he might be as little a loser
as possible he always enjoined the negro bearers of the dying man to strip
him naked before leaving the Gully, and not to forget to bring back his frock
and the board on which he had been carried down.
One poor creature, while in the act of being removed, screamed out most
piteously that he was not dead yet, and implored not to be left to perish in
the Gully in a manner so horrible. His cries had no effect upon the master,
but operated so forcibly on the less marble hearts of his fellow slaves that in
the night some of them removed him back to the negro village privately and
nursed him there with so much care that he recovered and left the estate un-
questioned and undiscovered. Unluckily, one day the master was passing
through Kingston, when, on turning the corner of a street suddenly, he found
himself face to face with the negro whom he had supposed long ago to have
been picked to the bones in the Gully. He immediately seized him, claimed
him as his slave and ordered his attendants to convey him to his house; but
the fellow’s cry attracted a crowd around them before he could be dragged
away. He related his melancholy story and the singular manner in which
he had recovered his life and liberty, and the public indignation was so
forcibly excited by the shocking tale that Mr. B was glad to save him-
self from being torn to pieces by a precipitate retreat from Kingston and
never ventured to advance his claim to the negro a second time.
But the story lived in the song which the narrator heard
half a century later. Imagine the dramatic pathos of the
words paired with the pathos of the tune which welled up
with them when the singers repeated the harsh utterances of
the master and the pleadings of the wretched slave! It is
out of experiences like these that folksongs are made.
There were, it is true, few cases of such monstrous cruelty
in any of the sections in which slavery flourished in America,
though it fell to my lot fifteen years after slavery had
been abolished to report the testimony in a law case
of an old black woman who was seeking to recover dam-
ages from a former Sheriff of Kenton County, Ky., for
having abducted her, when a free woman living in Cincin-
nati, and selling her into slavery. A slave she remained
until freed by President Lincoln’s proclamation, and in
measure of damages she told on the witness stand of
1 London, 1845.
[ 25 ]
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
seeing a young black woman on a plantation in Mississippi
stripped naked, tied by the feet and hands flat upon the
ground and so inhumanly flogged that she died in a few
hours. That story also might well have been perpetuated
in a folksong. There was sunshine as well as gloom in the
life of the black slaves in the Southern colonies and States,
and so we have songs which are gay as well as grave; but
as a rule the finest songs are the fruits of suffering under-
gone and the hope of the deliverance from bondage which
was to come with translation to heaven after death. The
oldest of them are the most beautiful, and many of the
most striking have never yet been collected, partly because
they contained elements, melodic as well as rhythmical,
which baffled the ingenuity of the early collectors. Un-
fortunately, trained musicians have never entered upon
the field, and it is to be feared that it is now too late. The
peculiarities which the collaborators on “Slave Songs of the
United States” recognized, but could not imprison on the
written page, were elements which would have been of
especial interest to the student of art.
Is it not the merest quibble to say that these songs are
not American? They were created in America under
American influences and by people who are Americans in
the same sense that any other element of our population
is American — every element except the aboriginal. But
is there an aboriginal element? Are the red men autoch-
thones ? Science seems to have answered that they are not.
Then they, too, are American only because they have come
to live in America. They may have come from
Asia. The majority of other Americans came from
Europe. Is it only an African who can sojourn here without
becoming an American and producing American things?
Is it a matter of length of stay in the country? Scarcely
that; or some negroes would have at least as good a claim
on the title as the descendants of the Puritans and Pilgrims.
Negroes figure in the accounts of his voyages to America
made by Columbus. Their presence in the West Indies
was noticed as early as 1501. Balboa was assisted by
negroes in building the first ships sent into the Pacific
[ 26 ]
SONGS OF THE AMERICAN SLAVES
Ocean from American shores. A year before the English
colonists landed on Plymouth Rock negroes were sold
into servitude in Virginia. When the first census of the
United States was taken in 1790, there were 757,208 negroes
in the country. There are now 10,000,000. These people
all speak the language of America. They are native born.
Their songs, a matter of real moment in the controversy,
are sung in the language of America (albeit in a corrupt
dialect), and as much entitled to be called American songs
as would be the songs, were there any such, created here
by any other element of our population. They may not
give voice to the feelings of the entire population of the
country, but for a song which shall do that we shall
have to wait until the amalgamation of the inhabitants of
the United States is complete. Will such a time ever come ?
Perhaps so; but it will be after the people of the world
cease swarming as they have swarmed from the birth of
history till now. There was a travelled road from Meso-
potamia to the Pillars of Hercules in the time of Abraham.
The women of Myksene wore beads of amber brought
from the German Ocean, when
“Xlion, like a mist, rose into towers.”
The folksongs of Suabia, Bavaria, the Rhineland, Fran-
conia— of all the German countries, principalities and
provinces — are German folksongs; the songs of the German
apprentices, soldiers, huntsmen, clerks, journeymen — giving
voice to the experiences and feelings of each group — are all
German folksongs. Why are not the songs of the American
negroes American folksongs? Can any one say? It is
deplorable that so pessimistic a note should sound through
the writings of any popular champion as sounds through
the most eloquent English book ever written by any one
of African blood; but no one shall read Burghardt DuBois’s
“The Souls of Black Folk” without being moved by the
pathos of his painful cry:
Your country? How came it yours? Before the Pilgrims landed we were
here. Here we have brought our three gifts and mingled them with yours —
a gift of story and song, soft, stirring melody in an ill harmonized and un-
melodious land; the gift of sweat and brawn to beat back the wilderness,
conquer the soil and lay the foundations of this vast economic empire two
[ 27 ]
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
hundred years earlier than your weak hands could have done it; the third,
a gift of the Spirit. Around us the history of the land has centered for thrice
a hundred years; out of the nation’s heart we have called all that was best
to throttle and subdue all that was worst; fire and blood, prayer and sacrifice,
have billowed over this people, and they have found peace only in the altars
of the God of Right. Nor has our gift of the Spirit been merely passive.
Actively we have woven ourselves with the very warp and woof of this nation
— we fought their battles, shared their sorrows, mingled our blood with theirs,
and generation after generation have pleaded with a headstrong, careless
people to despise not Justice, Mercy and Truth, lest the nation be smitten
with a curse. Our song, our toil, our cheer and warning have been given to
this nation in blood brotherhood. Are not these gifts worth giving? Is not
this work and striving? Would America have been America without her
negro people?
Even so is the hope that sang in the songs of my fathers well sung. If
somewhere in this swirl and chaos of things there dwells Eternal Good, pitiful
yet masterful, then anon in His good time America shall rend the veil and the
prisoned shall go free — free, free as the sunshine trickling down the morning
into these high windows of mine; free as yonder fresh voices welling up to me
from the caverns of brick and mortar below — swelling with song, instinct
with life, tremulous treble and darkening bass.
Greatly as it pains me, I should be sorry if one should
ask me to strike that passage out of “American” prose
writing.
I 28 ]
CHAPTER III
RELIGIOUS CHARACTER
OF THE SONGS
The Paucity of Secular Songs among the Slaves—
Campmeetings, “ Spirituals” and “Shouts” —
Work-Songs of the Fields and Rivers —
Lafcadio Hearn and Negro Music —
African Relics and Voodoo Cere-
monies.
Having looked into the genesis of the folksongs of the
American negroes, I purpose now to lay a foundation for
examination into some of the musical idioms which charac-
terize them, so that, presently, their origin as well as their
effect may be discussed. Before then, however, something
must be said about the various classes of songs and their
use. Here the most striking fact that presents itself is
the predominance of hymns, or religious songs. The reason
for this will readily be found by those who are willing
to accept Herbert Spencer’s theory of the origin of music
and my definition of folksong. Slavery was the sorrow
of the Southern blacks; religion was their comfort and
refuge. That religion was not a dogmatic, philosophical
or even ethical system so much as it was an emotional
experience. “These hymns,” says Mr. Allen in his intro-
duction to “Slave Songs of the United States,” “will be
found peculiarly interesting in illustrating the feelings,
opinions and habits of the slaves. . . . One of their
customs, often alluded to in the songs, ... is that of
wandering through the woods and swamps when under
religious excitement, like the ancient bacchantes.” “Al-
most all their songs were thoroughly religious in their
tone,” says Colonel Higginson, “and were in a minor key,
both as to words and music. The attitude is always the
same, and, as a commentary on the life of the race, is
infinitely pathetic. Nothing but patience for this life —
[ 29 ]
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
nothing but triumph in the next. Sometimes the present
predominates, sometimes the future; but the combination
is always implied.”1
“Though the words are sometimes rude and the strains
often wild, yet they are the outpourings of an ignorant and
poverty-stricken people, whose religious language and ideals
struggled for expression and found it through limited
vocabularies and primitive harmonies. They are not
merely poetry, they are life itself — the life of the human
soul manifesting itself in rude words, wild strains and
curious, though beautiful harmonies,” says Robert R.
Moton, commandant of Hampton Institute. Booker T.
Washington bears this testimony: “The negro folksong has
for the negro race the same value that the folksong of
any other people has for that people. It reminds the race
of the ‘rock whence it was hewn,’ it fosters race pride, and
in the days of slavery it furnished an outlet for the anguish
of smitten hearts. . . . The plantation songs known
as the ‘spirituals’ are the spontaneous outbursts of intense
religious fervor, and had their origin chiefly in the camp-
meetings, the revivals, and in other religious exercises.
They breathe a childlike faith in a personal Father and
glow with the hope that the children of bondage will ulti-
mately pass out of the wilderness of slavery into the land
of freedom.”
Writing in “The Century Magazine” for August, 1899,
Marion Alexander Haskell said: “The musical talent of
the uneducated negro finds almost its only expression in
religious song, and for this there is a simple explanation.
A race strongly imbued with religious sentiment, one rarely
finds among them an adult who has not gone through that
emotional experience known as conversion, after which
it is considered vanity and sinfulness to indulge in song
other than that of a sacred character. The new-found child
1 Concerning the prevalent mode of the songs Colonel Higginson is
in error; they are predominantly major, not minor. The mistake is a common
one among persons who have no technical training in music and who have
been taught that suffering always expresses itself in the minor mode. A
great majority of those who write about savage or primitive music generally
set it down as minor whenever it has a melancholy cast.
[ 30 ]
RELIGIOUS CHARACTER OF THE SONGS
You May Bury Me in the East
2. Father Gabriel in that day,
He’ll take wings and fly away,
For to hear the trumpet sound
In that morning-, etc.
You may bury him, etc.
3. Good old Christians in that day,
They’ll take, wing's and flyaway,
etc.
4. Good old preachers in that day,
Theyil take wings, etc.
5. In that dreadful judgment-day
i’ll take wings, etc.
Arranged for.men’s voices for the Mendelssohn Glee Club of New York by Arthur Mees; pub-
lished here by permission.
[ 31 ]
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
of the church knows but little of that which he must forgo,
for his mother before him sang only spirituals, and to these
he naturally turns as to old friends whom his own religious
experiences have clothed in new dignity and light.”
There is nothing strange in the fact that the original
collectors of slave songs and later students of slave life
in America should thus recognize the psychological origin
of negro song, for they were familiar with the phenomena
which accompanied it; but it is worthy of note that a
foreigner, who approached the subject on its scientific and
artistic side only and to whom all such phenomena must
have seemed strange, should have been equally apprecia-
tive. In his monograph, “La Musique chez les Peuples
indigenes de l’Amerique du Nord,” M. Julien Tiersot,
after describing a campmeeting as he had learned to know
it from the descriptions of others, says:
It is indubitable, as all who have made a special study of the question
agree, that it is in these superheated religious assemblies that the most genuine
( plus clair ) songs in the negro repertory had their origin. They use them on
all occasions. Like all peoples of low culture, the negroes accompany their
manual labors with song. Noteworthy are the “corn songs,” which are sung
in the harvest season to stimulate the gathering of the grain. The efficiency
of these songs is so well recognized that the owners of the plantations pay
extra wages to singers capable of leading the chorus of laborers. These songs,
however, have no distinctive character; they are religious hymns. The same
holds true of the songs sung by negroes for their diversion, when at rest in
their cabins, in the family circle or for the dance. Such a use need not surprise
us when we have seen their religious meetings degenerate into dishevelled
dances under the influence of the same songs. It is the hymn which must
sanctify the dance. Carefully do they guard it against any admixture of the
profane element! A superstitous dread in this regard is another convincing
proof of how completely they have forgotten their African origin. They would
believe themselves damned were they to repeat the songs of paganism; to
do this would, in their eyes, be to commit original and unpardonable sin.
The “dishevelled dance” to which M. Tiersot alludes
is the “shout” which in the days of slavery flourished
chiefly in South Carolina and the States south of it.
“It appears to be found in Florida,” says Mr. Allen in his
preface to ‘Slave Songs,’ “but not in North Carolina or
Virginia.” I have a hymn taken down from the lips of
an old slave woman in Kentucky which the collector1
designated as a “shout,” and it is probable that the custom
was more widely extended than Mr. Allen and his collabora-
1 Miss Mildred J. Hill, of Louisville, to whom I am indebted for several
interesting specimens.
[ 32 ]
RELIGIOUS CHARACTER OF THE SONGS
tors, who gleaned chiefly in South Carolina and the Gulf
States, knew. Mr. Allen refers to the fact that the term
“shouting” is used in Virginia “in reference to a peculiar
motion of the body not wholly unlike the Carolina shout-
ing.” Very keenly he surmises, too, that it “is not unlikely
that this remarkable religious ceremony is a relic of some
native African dance, as the Romai’ka is of the classic
Pyrrhic.” A secular parody of it can easily be recalled by
all persons who remember the old-fashioned minstrel shows,
for it was perpetuated in the so-called “walk-around” of
those entertainments. “Dixie,” which became the war-
song of the Southrons during the War of the Rebellion, was
written by Dan Emmet as a “walk-around” for Bryant’s
Minstrels in 1859. I shall let an eyewitness describe the
“shout.” It is a writer in “The Nation” of May 30, 1867:
There is a ceremony which the white clergymen are inclined to discoun-
tenance, and even of the colored elders some of the more discreet try sometimes
to put on a face of discouragement; and, although if pressed for Biblical
warrant for the “shout,” they generally seem to think, “he in de Book,” or,
“he dere-da in Matchew,” still it is not considered blasphemous or improper
if “de chillen” and “dem young gal” carry it on in the evening for amuse-
ment’s sake, and with no well-defined intention of “praise.” But the true
“shout” takes place on Sundays, or on “praise” nights through the week, and
either in the praise-house or in some cabin in which a regular religious meeting
has been held. Very likely more than half the population of a plantation is
gathered together. Let it be the evening, and a light wood fire burns red
before the door of the house and on the hearth. For some time one can hear,
though at a good distance, the vociferous exhortation or prayer of the pre-
siding elder or of the brother who has a gift that way and is not “on the back
seat” — a phrase the interpretation of which is “under the censure of the
church authorities for bad behavior” — and at regular intervals one hears
the elder “deaconing” a hymnbook hymn, which is sung two lines at a
time and whose wailing cadences, borne on the night air, are indescribably
melancholy.
But the benches are pushed back to the wall when the formal meeting is
over, and old and young, men and women, sprucely dressed young men,
grotesquely half-clad field hands — the women generally with gay handker-
chiefs twisted about their heads and with short skirts — boys with tattered
shirts and men’s trousers, young girls bare-footed, all stand up in the middle
of the floor, and when the “sperichil” is struck up begin first walking and
by and by shuffling around, one after the other, in a ring. The foot is hardly
taken from the floor, and the progression is mainly due to a jerking, hitching
motion which agitates the entire shouter and soon brings out streams of
perspiration. Sometimes they dance silently, sometimes as they shuffle they
sing the chorus of the spiritual, and sometimes the song itself is also sung by
the dancers. But more frequently a band, composed of some of the best
singers and of tired shouters, stand at the side of the room to “base” the others,
singing the body of the song and clapping their hands together or on the knees.
Song and dance are alike extremely energetic, and often, when the shout
lasts into the middle of the night, the monotonous thud, thud of the feet pre-
vents sleep within half a mile of the praise-house.
[ .33 ]
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
The editors of “Slave Songs” were liberal-minded per-
sons, who, though engaged in philanthropic work in behalf
of the freedmen, were prompted by cultural rather than
religious motives in directing attention to negro songs.
They deplored the fact that circumstances made the col-
lection almost wholly religious. Mr. Allen wrote: “I
never fairly heard a secular song among the Port Royal
freedmen, and never saw a musical instrument among
them. The last violin, owned by a ‘worldly man,’ dis-
appeared from Coffin’s Point ‘de year gun shoot at Bay
Pint’ (i. e.9 November, 1861). In other parts of the South
‘fiddle sings,’ ‘devil songs,’ ‘corn songs,’ ‘jig tunes’ and
what not, are common; all the world knows the banjo and
the ‘Jim Crow’ songs of thirty years ago. We have succeed-
ed in obtaining only a very few songs of this character.
Our intercourse with the colored people has been chiefly
through the work of the Freedmen’s Commission, which
deals with the serious and earnest side of the negro char-
acter”; and, discussing the “civilized” character of the
songs which he prints, he says: “It is very likely that if
we had found it possible to get at more of their se-
cular music we should have come to another con-
clusion as to the proportion of the barbaric element.”
Then he makes room for a letter from “a gentleman
from Delaware,” who makes a number of shrewd obser-
vations, as thus:
We must look among their non-religious songs for the purest specimens
of negro minstrelsy. It is remarkable that they have themselves transferred
the best of these to the uses of their churches, I suppose on Mr. Wesley’s
principle that “it is not right that the devil should have all the good tunes.”
Their leaders and preachers have not found this change difficult to effect, or
at least they have taken so little pains about it that one often detects the
profane cropping out and revealing the origin of their most solemn “hymns”
in spite of the best intentions of the poet and artist. Some of the best pure
negro songs I have ever heard were those that used to be sung by the black
stevedores, or perhaps the crews themselves, of the West India vessels,
loading and unloading at the wharves in Philadelphia and Baltimore. I
have stood for more than an hour, often, listening to them as they hoisted
and lowered the hogsheads and boxes of their cargoes, one man taking the
burden of the song (and the slack of the rope) and the others striking in with
the chorus. They would sing in this way more than a dozen different songs
in an hour, most of which might, indeed, be warranted to contain “nothing
religious” — a few of them, “on the contrary, quite the reverse” — but gener-
ally rather innocent and proper in their language and strangely attractive
in their music.
[ 34 ]
RELIGIOUS CHARACTER OF THE SONGS
A generation ago songs of the character described here
were still to be heard from the roustabouts of the Missis-
sippi and Ohio rivers, and two of them, together with a
paddle song dating back to the time of the Acadians,
showing unique characteristics, will be discussed later.
M. Tiersot’s generalizations on negro music, to which,
it may be said, he denies all African attributes because the
blacks have forgotten the language and customs of their
ancestors, were based chiefly on reports of plantation life
in which old French and Spanish influences were less
potent than English. He recognizes the existence of a
species of dance-song in which French influences have
been predominantly formative, however, and discusses
them in an interesting and instructive manner. They are
the patois songs of the black creoles of Louisiana, concern-
ing which I shall have something to say in due time. They
are songs of sentiment and songs of satire — the latter
characteristic, I believe, a relic of their African source.
There is another, smaller, body of songs outside of the
religious domain to which the spirituals give expression
which would, I am convinced, have been of large value in
proving the persistence of African idioms in exotic Ameri-
can songs if it had been possible to obtain a sufficient
number of them to make a comparative study possible. Un-
fortunately this is not the case, and I very much question
whether it will ever be done. The investigation has been
postponed too long. The opportunity would have been
incalculably greater half a century ago, when the subject
was new. I made an effort to get some of these songs
thirty-five years or so ago, when much more of this music
was in existence than now, and, though I had the help
of so enthusiastic a folklorist as the late Lafcadio Hearn,
they eluded me. A few specimens came into my hands,
but they proved to be of no musical value, chiefly because
it was obvious that they had not been correctly transcribed.
The songs in question are those which were consorted
with the mysterious voodoo rites practised by the blacks,
who clung to a species of snake-worship which had been
brought over from Africa. The preservation of relics of
1 35 ]
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
this superstitious worship until a comparatively late date
was no doubt due to the negroes who had been brought
into American territory long after the abolition of the slave
trade. At the outbreak of the War of the Rebellion the
number of these people was by no means inconsiderable.
Though the slave trade was abolished by the United
States in 1808 and those who followed it were declared
pirates in 1820, negroes brought over from Africa were
smuggled into the States by way of the Antilles for many
years. It was not until 1861 that a trader was* convicted
under the law and hanged in New York. As late as 1888
Professor Edwards, describing the negro inhabitants of the
Bahamas, who had already enjoyed freedom for more than
fifty years, could write: “There lives yet in Green Turtle
Cay one old negro, ‘Unc’ Yawk,’ who, bowing his grizzled
head, will tell you, £Yah, I wa’ fum Haf’ca.’ ”
It is well to remember facts like these when it is urged,
as it is even by so good a musical folklorist as M. Tiersot,
that African relics are not to be sought for in the music of
the American negroes because they have forgotten the
languages (not language) of their African ancestors. In the
songs which have been heard by the few people who have
left us accounts of the voodoo rites, African words are
used, though their meaning has been lost. The phenomenon
is not at all singular. Plato found the Egyptian priests
using in their prayers, instead of words, the sacred vowels
of their language, which they said had been taught their
ancestors by Isis and Osiris. Buddhist monks in China,
I have been told, still recite prayers in Sanskrit, though they
do not understand a single word; small wonder, for nearly
two thousand years have passed since Buddhism was intro-
duced into China from India. The Gothic Christians at the
time of the venerable Bede recited the Lord’s Prayer in
Greek. Is it difficult to understand what this means ?
Religion is a wonderful conservator. A greater sanc-
tity attaches in worship to sounds than to words, for the
first prayers were exclamations which came straight from
the emotions — not words, but musical cries. It is for this
reason that sacred music endures longer than articulate
[ 36 ]
RELIGIOUS CHARACTER OF THE SONGS
speech. A veneration which is very much akin to super-
stition clings to both words and music in many organized
religious systems to-day. Would it be irreverent to account
on this ground for the attitude of the Pope and the Congre-
gation of Rites toward the Gregorian Chant ? Why is the
effort making to ignore the wise reforms of the sixteenth
century and revert to the forms of the tenth? Since it
is more than likely that the old dances and superstitious
rites of African peoples have left an impress upon the
music of their descendants in America, regard must be
had for these things, even though we must forgo such
an analytical study of the music as we should like to make.
In 1878, while Lafcadio Hearn and I were collaborating
in an effort to gather material for a study of creole music,
I sent him (he was then living in New Orleans) the words
of a song which I had got — I do not remember where —
for interpretation. In reply he wrote:
Your friend is right, no doubt, about the
“ Tig, tig, trial aboin
La chelema che tango
Redjoum!”
I asked my black nurse what it meant. She only laughed and shook her
head: “Mais c’est Voudoo, 9a; je n’en sais rien!” “Well,” said I, “don’t you
know anything about Voudoo songs?” “Yes,” she answered; “I know Voudoo
songs; but I can’t tell you what they mean.” And she broke out into the
wildest, weirdest ditty I ever heard. I tried to write down the words; but as
I did not know what they meant I had to write by sound alone, spelling the
words according to the French pronunciation.
He sent me the words and also the words of a creole
love-song, whose words ran like this: “Beautiful American,
I love thee! Beautiful American, I am going to Havana
to cut sugar-cane to give thee money. I am going to
Havana, friends, to cut sugar-cane, friends, to give thee
money, beautiful woman, Cesaire! I love thee, beautiful
American !” He got a German amateur musician to write
down the music to both songs for him, but it was from his
singing that the transcription was made, and when it was
repeated to him he found it incorrect. Hearn was not
musical. “As I heard it sung the voodoo melody was
really weird, although simple,” he wrote me afterward;
“there were such curious linkings of long notes to short
with microscopic ones. The other, ‘Belle Americaine,’
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
seemed to me pretty, but G. has put only two notes where
I heard five distinctly.” The nurse who sang for him was
Louise Roche, “an old black woman of real African blood,
an ex-slave having many tales of terror, suspected of
voodooism, etc.”
Much later (it was in 1885), when I was contemplating a
cooperation with Mr. George W. Cable in the articles
which he published in the “Century Magazine” for Feb-
ruary and April, 1886, on creole songs and dances, Hearn
wrote :
I fear I know nothing about Creole music or Creole negroes. Yes, I have
seen them dance; but they danced the Congo and sang a purely African song
to the accompaniment of a drygoods box beaten with sticks or bones and a
drum made by stretching a skin over a flour barrel. That sort of accompani-
ment and that sort of music you know all about; it is precisely similar to what
a score of travellers have described. There are no harmonies — only a furious
contretemps. As for the dance — in which the women do not take their feet
off the ground — it is as lascivious as is possible. The men dance very different-
ly, like savages, leaping in the air. I spoke of this spectacle in my short
article in the “Century.” . . .
The Creole songs which I have heard sung in the city are Frenchy in
construction, but possess a few African characteristics of method. The darker
the singer, the more marked the oddities of intonation. Unfortunately, the
most of those I have heard were quadroons or mulattoes. One black woman
sang me a Voudoo song, which I got Cable to write — but I could not sing it
as she sang it, so that the music is faulty. I suppose you have seen it already,
as it forms part of the collection.
it was about this time (February, 1884, unless I am
deceived by a postmark) that Hearn conceived the idea
of a book on negro music, of which we were to be joint
authors. He was to write “a long preface and occasional
picturesque notes” to what he called my “learning and
facts.” He outlined what he would put in the preface:
He would begin by treating of the negro’s musical pat-
riotism— “the strange history of the griots , who furnish
so singular an example of musical prostitution, and who,
though honored and petted on one way, are otherwise
despised by their own people and refused rites of burial.”
Then he proposed to relate:
Something about the curious wanderings of these griots through the yellow
desert northward into the Maghreb country, often a solitary wandering;
their performances at Arab camps on the long journey, when the black slaves
came out to listen and weep; then the hazardous voyage into Constantinople,
where they play old Congo airs for the great black population of Stamboul,
whom no laws or force can keep within doors when the sound of griot music is
heard in the street. Then I would speak of how the blacks carry their music
[ 38 1
RELIGIOUS CHARACTER OF THE SONGS
with them to Persia and even to mysterious Hadramant, where their voices
are held in high esteem by Arab masters. Then I would touch upon the
transplantation of negro melody to the Antilles and the two Americas, where
its strangest black flowers are gathered by the alchemists of musical science
and the perfume thereof extracted by magicians like Gottschalk. (How is
that for a beginning?)
Having advanced thus far Hearn proposed to show a
relation between physiology and negro music, and he put
upon me the burden of finding out whether or not the
negro’s vocal cords were differently formed and “capable
of longer vibrations” than those of white people. He had
been led into this branch of the subject by the observation,
which he found in some book, that the blood of the Afri-
can black “has the highest human temperature known —
equal to that of the swallow — though it loses that fire
in America.” I must have been lukewarm in the matter
of the project which he outlined with great enthusiasm,
despairing, as naturally a sobersided student of folk-music
who believed in scientific methods would, of being able
to make the physical data keep pace with so riotous an
imagination as that of my fantastical friend. I did not
even try to find a colored subject for the dissecting table or
ask for a laryngoscopical examination of the vocal cords
of the “Black Patti.” His enthusiasm and method in our
joint work are strikingly illustrated in another part of the
same letter. As has been intimated, we were looking for
unmistakable African relics in the creole songs of Louisiana:
Here is the only Creole song I know of with an African refrain that is still
sung — don’t show it to C., it is one of our treasures.
(Pronounce “wenday,” “makkiah.”)
Ouende , ouende, macaya!
Mo pas barrasse, macaya!
Ouende , ouende , macaya!
Mo bois bon divin, macaya!
Ouende , ouende , macaya!
Mo mange bon poulet, macaya!
Ouende , ouende , macaya!
Mo pas barrasse, macaya!
Ouende, ouende , macaya!
Macaya!
I wrote from the dictation of Louise Roche. She did not know the meaning
of the refrain — her mother had taught her, and the mother had learned it
from the grandmother. However, I found out the meaning, and asked her
if she now remembered. She leaped in the air for joy — apparently. Ouendai ,
or ouende, has a different meaning in the eastern Soudan; but in the Congo,
or Fiot, dialect it means “to go,” “to continue to,” “to go on.” I found the
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
word in Jeannest’s vocabulary. Then macaya I found in Turiault’s “Etude
sur la Language^ Creole de la Martinique”: “$a veut dire manger tout le
temps” — “excessivement.” Therefore, here is our translation:
Go on! go on! eat enormously!
I ain’t one bit ashamed — eat outrageously!
Go on! go on! eat 'prodigiously!
I drink good wine! — eat ferociously!
Go on! go on! eat unceasingly! —
I eat good chicken — gorging myself!
Go on! go on! etc.
How is this for a linguistic discovery? The music is almost precisely like
the American river music — a chant, almost a recitative, until the end of
the line is reached: then for your mocking music!
There is a hint of an African relic in the allusion to the
recitative-like character of the feasting song, as we shall
see when we come to inquire into the structure of African
music.
For a description of the voodoo rites I draw, by per-
mission, upon Mr. George W. Cable’s article on “Creole
Slave Songs,” which appeared in “The Century Magazine”
for April, 1886:
The dance and song entered into the negro worship. That worship was as
dark and horrid as bestialized savagery could make the adoration of serpents.
So revolting was it, and so morally hideous, that even in the West Indian French
possessions a hundred years ago, with the slave trade in full blast, and the
West Indian planter and slave what they were, the orgies of the voudoos
were forbidden.
The Aradas, St. Mery tells us, introduced them from their homes beyond
the Slave Coast, one of the most dreadfully benighted regions of all Africa.
He makes the word vaudau. In Louisiana it is written voudou and voodoo
and is often changed on the negro’s lips to hoodoo. It is the name of an
imaginary being of vast supernatural powers, residing in the form of a harmless
snake. This spiritual influence, or potency, is the recognized antagonist
and opposite of Obi, the great African manitou, or deity, whom the Congos.
vaguely generalize as Zombi. In Louisiana, as I have been told by that learned
Creole scholar, the late Alexander Dimitry, Voodoo bore, as a title of greater
solemnity, the additional name Maignan, and that even in the Calinda dance,
which he had witnessed innumerable times, was sometimes heard at the height
of its frenzy the invocation —
“A'ie! Ai'e! Voudoo Maignan!”
The worship of Voodoo is paid to a snake kept in a box. The worshippers
are not merely a sect, but in some rude, savage way, also an order. A man and
woman, chosen from their own number to be the oracles of the serpent-deity,
are called the king and queen. The queen is the more important of the two,
and even in the present dilapidated state of the worship in Louisiana, where the
king’s office has almost or quite disappeared, the queen is still a person of
great note. It (voodoo worship) long ago diminished in frequency to once a
year, the chosen night always being the eve of St. John. For several years
past the annual celebrations have been suspended; but in the summer of
1884 they were — let it be hoped only for the once — resumed. . . .
Now a new applicant for membership steps into the circle. There are a
few trivial formalities and the voodoo dance begins. The postulant dances
frantically in the middle of the ring, only pausing, from time to time, to-
[ 40 ]
RELIGIOUS CHARACTER OF THE SONGS
receive heavy alcholic draughts in great haste and return more wildly to his
leapings and writhings until he falls in convulsions. He is lifted, restored, and
presently conducted to the altar, takes his oath, and by a ceremonial stroke
from one of the sovereigns is admitted a full participant in the privileges and
obligations of the devilish free masonry. But the dance goes on about the
snake. The contortions of the upper part of the body, especially of the neck
and shoulders, are such as to threaten to dislocate them. The queen shakes
the box and tinkles the bells, the rum bottle gurgles, the chant alternates
between king and chorus:
“Eh! Eh! Bomba hone, hone!
Canga bafio tay.
Canga moon day lay,
Canga do keelah,
Canga li!”
There are swoonings and ravings, nervous tremblings beyond control,
incessant writhings and turnings, tearing of garments, even biting of the
flesh — every imaginable invention of the devil.
f « ]
CHAPTER IV
MODAL CHARACTERISTICS
OF THE SONGS
An Analysis of Half a Thousand Negro Songs —
Division as to Modes — Overwhelming Preva-
lence of Major — Psychology of the Pheno-
menon— Music as a Stimulus to Work —
Songs of the Fieldhands and Rowers.
To lay a foundation for a discussion of the idioms of the
folksongs created by the American negroes I have examined
527 negro songs found in six collections, five of which have
appeared in print. Of these five collections, four are
readily accessible to the student. The titles of the printed
collections are :
“Slave Songs of the United States,” edited by William
Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware and Lucy McKim
Garrison; published by A. Simpson & Co., New York,
1867. This work, by far the most valuable and compen-
dious source, as it is the earliest, is out of print and difficult
to obtain.
“The Story of the Jubilee Singers, with Their Songs,”
by J. B. T. Marsh. Published by Houghton, Osgood & Co.,
Boston, 1880. This is a revised edition of two earlier
publications, the music arranged by Theodore F. Seward
and George L. White, of which the first was printed by
Bigelow & Main, New York, in 1872.
“Religious Folk Songs of the Negroes as Sung on the
Plantations,” arranged by the musical directors of the
Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute from the
original edition of Thomas P. Fenner. Published by the
Institute Press, Hampton, Va., 1909. The original edition,
entitled “Cabin and Plantation Songs as Sung by the
Hampton Students,” was published in 1874; an enlarged
edition by Thomas P. Fenner and Frederic G. Rathbun,
by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, in 1891.
[ 42 ]
MODAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE SONGS
“Bahama Songs and Stories. A Contribution to Folk-
Lore,” by Charles L. Edwards, Ph. D. Boston and New
York, published for the American Folk-Lore Society by
Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1895.
“Calhoun Plantation Songs,” collected and edited by
Emily Hallowed; first edition, 1901; second edition, 1907;
Boston, C. W. Thompson & Co.
These books, as well as the author’s private collection,
have been drawn on not so much to show the beauty and
wealth of negro folksong as to illustrate its varied charac-
teristics. An analysis of the 527 songs in respect of the
intervallic structure of their melodies is set forth in the
following table:
Ordinary major 331
Ordinary minor 62
Mixed and vague 23
Pentatonic Ill
Major with flatted seventh 20
Major without seventh 78
Major without fourth 45
Minor with raised sixth 8
Minor without sixth 34
Minor with raised seventh (leading-tone) 19
“Almost all their songs were religious in their tone,
however quaint their expression, and were in a minor
key, both as to words and music,” wrote Colonel Higgin-
son, in “The Atlantic Monthly.” — “They that walked in
darkness sang songs in the olden days — sorrow songs —
for they were weary at heart. . . . They (the songs)
are the music of an unhappy people, of the children of
disappointment; and they tell of death and suffering and
unvoiced longing toward a truer world, of misty wander-
ings and hidden ways,” says Dr. Du Bois, in “The Souls
of Black Folk.” — “A tinge of sadness pervades all the melo-
dies, which bear as little resemblance to the popular
Ethiopian melodies of the day as twilight to noonday,”
wrote Mr. Spaulding, in “The Continental Monthly.”
Mr. Allen, in his preface to “Slave Songs,” avoids musical
terminology as much as possible, and has nothing to say
about the modes of the melodies which he records, though
his description of the manner of singing and some of the
peculiarities of intonation, in which I recognize character-
[ 43 ]
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
istic idioms of the music, is so lucid as to enable a scientific
student to form definite conclusions on technical points
with ' ease. Colonel Higginson evidently did not intend
that the word “minor” should have any other than its con-
ventional literary meaning, which makes it a synonym for
melancholy. The musical terminology of explorers, as
has been remarked, is not to be depended on, and little
is to be learned from them as to the prevailing modal
characteristics of the music of the many peoples of Africa.
Hermann Soyaux, in his “Aus West-Afrika,” says that the
negroes of Sierra Leone always sing in minor. Friedrich
Ratzel says that the Bongo negroes sometimes sing in
minor. “Their style,” says Richard F. Burton, in the
“Lake Regions of Central Africa,” “is the recitative
broken by a full chorus, and they appear to affect the
major rather than the interminable minor of the Asiatic.”
Carl Engel, in his “Introduction to the Study of National
Music,” gives it out as a generalization that most of the
African melodies are major. Of the seven African melodies
which Coleridge-Taylor utilized in “Twenty-four Negro
Melodies,” five are major, two minor. Of the 527 melo-
dies analyzed in the above table, less than 12 per cent are
minor, the remainder either major or pentatonic, with a
slight infusion, negligible at this stage of the argument, of
melodies in which the mode is unpronounced.
It is plain, therefore, either that the popular conception,
which I have permitted to stand with a qualification, of the
minor mode as a symbol of suffering, is at fault in respect
of the folksongs of the American negroes, or that these songs
are not so poignant an expression of the life of the black
slaves as has been widely assumed. The question deserves
looking into. As a matter of fact, musicians know that the
major and minor modes are not unqualified expressions
of pleasure and pain, gayety and gravity, happiness and
sorrow. Funeral marches are never expressions of joy,
yet great funeral marches have been written in the major
mode — Handel’s Dead March in “Saul” for instance — and
some of the maddest scherzos are minor. It may be
questioned, too, whether or not, as a matter of fact (the
[ 44 ]
MODAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE SONGS
physiological and psychological explanation of which is
not within the scope of this study), the life of the black
slaves was, on the whole, so weighted with physical and
spiritual suffering as necessarily to make its musical ex-
pression one of hopeless grief. Perhaps an innate lightness
of heart and carelessness of disposition, carefully cultivated
by the slaveholders for obvious reasons, had much to do
with the circumstance that there are few utterances of
profound sadness or despair found in the songs, but many
of resilient hopefulness and cheerful endurance of present
pain in contemplation of the rewards of rest and happiness
hereafter. The two emotional poles in question are touched
in the settings of the song “Nobody Knows.”
Colonel Higginson seems to have sounded the keynote of
the emotional stimulus of the songs when he spoke of their
infinitepathos as a commentary on the livesof theircreators :
“Nothing but patience for this life — nothing but triumph in
the next.” This feeling was encouraged by the attitude,
legal and personal, of the slave owners toward their human
chattels. To let them acquire an education was dangerous,
for, as a rule, insurrections were fomented by educated men;
but to encourage them in their rude, emotional religious
worship was not harmful and might be positively beneficial.
Under such circumstances it was natural that the poetical
expressions of their temporal state should run out in
religious allegory, and here the utterance had to be pre-
dominantly cheerful in the very nature of the case. They
could not sing of the New Jerusalem, toward which they
were journeying, in tones of grief. The Biblical tales and
imagery, which were all of the book which seized upon their
imagination, also called for celebration in jubilant rather
than lugubrious accents. The rolling of Jordan’s waters, the
sound of the last trump, the overwhelming of Pharaoh’s
hosts, the vision of Jacob’s ladder, the building of the Ark,
Daniel in the den of lions, Ezekiel’s “wheel in the middle of
a wheel,” Elijah’s chariot of fire, the breaking up of the uni-
verse— all these things and the lurid pictures of the Apoca-
lypse, whether hymned with allegorical intent or as literal con-
ceptions, asked forswellingproclamation. And all received it.
[ 45 ]
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
It is possible, of course, even likely, though the records
are not convincing, that restrictions were placed upon the
songs of the slaves, in which an explanation may be found
for the general tone of cheer, not unmixed with pathos,
which characterizes the music. There is a hint of this in
a remark recorded by Mrs. Frances Anne Kemble in her
“Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation,” name-
ly: “I have heard that many of the masters and overseers
on these plantations prohibit melancholy tunes or words
and encourage nothing but cheerful music and senseless
words, deprecating the effect of sadder strains upon the
slaves, whose peculiar musical sensibility might be ex-
pected to make them especially excitable by any songs
of a plaintive character and having reference to their
particular hardships.” Examples of such restrictive regu-
lations are not unknown to history. The Swiss soldiery
in the French army were prohibited from singing the
melody of the “Ranz des Vaches” because it produced
homesickness, and the Austrian government has several
times forbidden the sale of the Rakoczy March and con-
fiscated the music found in the shops in times of political
disturbance in Hungary.
Had the folksongs of the American negro been conceived
in sorrow and born in heaviness of heart by a people
walking in darkness, they could not have been used indis-
criminately, as they were, for spiritual comfort and physical
stimulation. It is the testimony of the earliest collectors
that they were so used. Though it cannot be said that the
employment of music to lighten and quicken work and in-
crease its efficiency was peculiar to the slave life of America,
it is nevertheless worth noting that this use, like some of
the idioms of the music itself, was a relic of the life of the
negroes in their aboriginal home. James Augustus Grant,
in his book “A Walk Across Africa,” as cited by Wallaschek,
says that his people when cleaning rice were always sup-
ported by singers, who accompanied the workers with
clapping of hands and stamping of feet. George Francis
Lyon, in his “Narrative of Travels in Northern Africa,”
says that at one place he heard the negro women singing
[ 46 ]
MODAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE SONGS
a national song in chorus while pounding wheat, always in
time with the music. “Mr. Reade observed,” says Walla-
schek, citing W. Winwood Reade’s “The African Sketch
Book,”1 “that his people always began to sing when he
compelled them to overcome their natural laziness and to
continue rowing.” Here the song, of course, had for its
purpose the promotion of synchronism in movement,
like the rhythm of the march all the world over.
It is immaterial whether the use of song as a stimulant
to work was brought from Africa or was acquired in
America; the significant fact is that wherever negro
slavery existed on this continent there it was found. In
his peculiarly fascinating book “Two Years in the French
West Indies,” Lafcadio Hearn says: “Formerly the work
of cane-cutting resembled the march of an army — first
advanced the cutlassers in line, naked to the waist; then
the amareuses , the women who tied and carried, and be-
hind these the ka , the drum, with a paid crieur or crieuse ,
to lead the song, and lastly the black commandeur for
general.” In his preface to Coleridge-Taylor’s “Twenty-
four Negro Melodies” Booker T. Washington says:
“Wherever companies of negroes were working together,
in the cotton fields and tobacco factories, on the levees and
steamboats, on sugar plantations, and chiefly in the fervor
of religious gatherings, these melodies sprang into life.
Oftentimes in slavery, as to-day in certain parts of the
South, some man or woman with an exceptional voice was
paid to lead the singing, the idea being to increase the
amount of labor by such singing.” And thus speaks the
writer of the article entitled “American Music” in “The
American History and Encyclopaedia of Music,” published
by Irving Squire: “Work on the plantations was often
done to the accompaniment of songs, whose rhythmic
swing acted as an incentive to steadier and better labor;
especially was this true with the mowers at harvest.
Charles Peabody tells of a leader in a band of slaves who
was besought by his companions not to sing a certain
song because it made them work too hard. Again, on the
1 Vol. II, page 313.
[ 47 ]
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
boats plying between the West Indies and Baltimore and
the Southern ports, which were manned by the blacks,
song was used for the same purpose. Later, on the South-
ern river boats, the same method was utilized. These
boat-songs usually were constructed of a single line followed
by an unmeaning chorus, the solo being sung by one of
the leaders and the rhythmic refrain repeated over and
over by the workers.”
There is nothing especially characteristic of slave life
in such “water music” except its idiom. The sailorman’s
“chanty,” I fancy, is universal in one form or another.
The singular fact to be noted here is that the American
negro’s “spirituals” were also his working songs, and the
significance which this circumstance has with relation
to their mood and mode. The spirituals could not have
been thus employed had they been lugubrious in tone or
sluggish in movement. The paucity of secular working
songs has already been commented on. Of songs referring
to labor in the field the editors of “Slave Songs of the
United States” were able to collect only two examples.
Both of them are “corn songs,” and the first is a mere
fragment, the only words of which have been preserved
being “Shock along, John.” The second defied interpre-
tation fifty years ago and is still incomprehensible:
Five can’t ketch me and ten can’t hold me —
Ho, round the corn, Sally!
Here’s your iggle-quarter and here’s your count-aquils —
Ho, round the corn, Sally!
I can bank, ’ginny bank, ’ginny bank the weaver —
Ho, round the corn, Sally!
“The same songs are used for rowing as for shouting,”
says Mr. Allen, and adds: “I know of only one pure boat
song, the fine lyric, ‘Michael, row the boat ashore’; and
this I have no doubt is a real spiritual — it being the Arch-
angel Michael that is addressed.”
My analytical table shows that three-fifths of the songs
which I have examined contain the peculiarly propulsive
rhythmical snap, or catch, which has several times been
described as the basis of “ragtime.”
It is this rhythm which helps admirably to make a
physical stimulus of the tunes, and it is noteworthy that
[ 48 ]
MODAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE SONGS
it is equally effective in slow and fast time. Essentially,
therefore, it has nothing to do with the secular dance,
though it plays a large part in the “shout.” Mr. Ware
mentions twelve songs as among the most common rowing
tunes, and says of them: “As I have written these tunes
two measures are to be sung to each stroke, the first
measure being accented by the beginning of the stroke,
the second by the rattle of the oars in the rowlocks. On
the passenger boat at the (Beaufort) ferry they rowed
from sixteen to thirty strokes a minute; twenty-four was
the average. Of the tunes I heard I should say that the
most lively were ‘Heaven bell a-ring/ ‘Jine ’em,’ ‘Rain
fall/ ‘No man/ ‘Bell da ring’ and ‘Can’t stay behin’ and
that ‘Lay this body down,’ ‘Religion so sweet’ and ‘Michael,
row/ were used when the load was heavy or the tide was
against us.”
A few additonal comments seem to be justified by
these songs. Of the twelve, only three contain references
to a water passage of any sort. In “Praise member”1
two lines run:
Jordan’s bank is a good old bank,
And I hain’t but one more river to cross.
In “Michael, row the boat ashore” the archangel’s boat
is darkly described as a “gospel boat” and also as a “music
boat,” but there is no connection betwen these epithets
and the rest of the song. “Praise member” presented a
riddle to the editors, which they might have solved had they
reflected on the effect which its use as a rowing song may
have had upon its text.
Mr. Ware gives the last verse as “O I wheel to de right
and I wheel to de left”; Colonel Higginson contributes a
variant reading, “There’s a hill on my leff, an’ he catch
on my right” and adds the only and unsatisfactory explana-
tion given to him: “Dat mean if you go on de leff you go
to ’struction, and if you go on de right go to God for sure.”
Miss Charlotte L. Forten has another version, “I hop on
my right an’ I catch on my leff,” and makes the shrewd
observation that she supposes that “some peculiar motion
1 No. 5 of “Slave Songs.”
[ 49 ]
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
of the body formed the original accompaniment of the
song, but has now fallen into disuse.,, If the rowing singer
meant “hold” or “stop” or “back” on my right and catch
on my left, even a novice at the oars would have understood
the motion as a familiar one in steering.
This is interesting, I think, though outside of the parti-
cular line of argument for which I introduced the working
songs of the slaves — namely, to explain their general cheer-
fulness. Just as interesting is a singular custom which Mr.
Reuben Tomlinson mentions in connection with the enig-
matic song beginning “Rain fall and wet Becca Lawton,”
which has a refrain, “Been back holy, I must come slowly,
Oh! Brudder, cry holy!” In place of “Been back” there
are as variants “Beat back,” “Bent back” and “Rack
back.” When the song is used for rowing, Mr. Tomlinson
says, “at the words ‘Rack back holy’ one rower reaches
back and slaps the man behind him, who in turn does the
same and so on.” It is not impossible, or even improbable,
that this form of the game which was played in my boy-
hood, called “Pass it along,” was an African survival.
It may be, too, that there is another relic, an African
superstition, in the song. Colonel Higginson heard it as
“Rain fall and wet Becky Martin”; a variant of the first
line of the song as printed in “Slave Songs” is “Sun shine
and dry Becca Lawton.” Colonel Higginson comments:
“Who Becky Martin was, and why she should or should
not be wet, and whether the dryness was a reward or a
penalty, none could say. I got the impression that in
either case the event was posthumous, and that there was
some tradition of grass not growing over the grave of the
sinner; but even this was vague, and all else vaguer.”
In their note on the song the editors of “Slave Songs” say:
“Lieutenant-Colonel Trowbridge heard a story that Peggy
Norton was an old prophetess who said that it would not
do to be baptized except when it rained; if the Lord was
pleased with those who had been £in the wilderness’, he
would send rain.” To go into the wilderness was to seek
conversion from sin, to go to “the mourners’ bench,” as
our Methodist brethren say. Mr. Tomlinson said that the
[ 50 ]
MODAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE SONGS
song always ended with a laugh, and he concluded from
this that the negroes themselves regarded it as mere non-
sense.
Not much else are the words of two Mississippi River
songs, which are printed herewith, the music of which,
however, has elements of unique interest. “Oh, Rock Me,
Julie,” (see p. 52) and “I’m Gwine to Alabamy” (see p. 53),
are singularly alike in structure, with their exclamatory
cadenza. They are also alike in bearing a resemblance
to the stereotyped formula of the music of the North
American Indians, with its high beginning and the repeti-
tion of a melodic motif on lower degrees of the scale. But
“Rock Me, Julie,” is unique in being built on the whole-
tone scale, which has caused so much comment since De-
bussy exploited it in artistic music.
There is nothing in either words or music necessarily
to connect a “Cajan” boat-song in my manuscript collection
(see page 54) with the folksongs of the negroes, but the
song is intrinsically interesting as a relic of the Acadian
period in Louisiana. It was written down for me from
memory a generation ago by Mrs. Wulsin, mother of the
late Lucien Wulsin, of Cincinnati, a descendant, I believe,
of one of the old couriers des bois . It is a canoe, or paddling,
song, and there is no trace of the creole patois in its text.
Les marenquins nous piquent —
II faut pagayer;
L’on ne passe sa vie
Toujours en pagayant.
Pagaie, pagaie, pagaie, mon enfant.
(The mosquitoes sting us; we must paddle. One’s life is not all passed in
paddling. Paddle, paddle, paddle, my boy.)
The lines in the second verse as they remained in
Mrs. Wulsin’s memory do not adjust themselves to the
melody, but they, no doubt, preserve the sense of the old
song:
Toute la semaine
L’on mange de la sacamite,
Et le Dimanche pour se regaler
L’on mange du gombo file.
Pagaie, etc.
(All the week we eat sacamitey and on Sundays, for good cheer, we eat gombo
file. Paddle, etc.)
[ 51 ]
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
Oh! Rock Mejulie
Words and melody received by the author from Mr. Georg-e W. Cable. The arrangement mada
for this work by H.T, Burleigh. The melody is based on the*1 whole -tone’' scale.
[ 52 ]
MODAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE SONGS
I’m Gwine to Alabamy
Z. She went from ole Virginay,
And I’m her pickaninny.
3. She lives on the Tombigbee,
I wish I had her wid me.
4. Row I’m a good big* nigger,
I reckon I won’t git bigger.
5. But I’d like to see my mammy,
Who lives in Alabamy.
"A very good specimen, so far as notes can give oneV says the editor ofr'Slave Songs of the
United States”, “of tbe. strange barbaric songs that one hears upon the Western Steamboats’,’
The arrangement made for this work by H.T. Burleigh.
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
Acadian Boatmen’s Song
Con moto
Written down as a recollection of her childhood in New Orleans by Mrs.Wolsin, mother of the
late Lucien Walsin of Cincinnati, for the author. The arrangement made for this publication by
H.T. Burleigh.
t 54 ]
MODAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE SONGS
“Sacamite,” Lafcadio Hearn wrote in my notebook,
“is a favorite Creole (and, of course, Acadian) dish made
of corn broken and boiled with milk into a sort of thick
soup. I do not know the etymology of this word.”
[ 55 ]
CHAPTER V
MUSIC AMONG THE AFRICANS
The Many and Varied Kinds of African Slaves — -
Not All Negroes — Their Aptitude and Love for
Music — Knowledge and Use of Harmony —
Dahomans at Chicago — Rhythm and
Drumming — African Instruments
So much for modes and moods. The analytical table
in the last chapter showed several variations of both the
major and minor scales, and these variations must be
examined, for upon them, together with rhythmical and
structural characteristics, rest the idioms which have been
referred to as determining the right of the songs of the
American negroes to be called original. These idioms are
the crude material which the slaves brought with them from
their African homes. This, at least, is the conviction of
this writer, and the contention which he hopes to establish
by a study of the intervallic and rhythmical peculiarities
of the songs and by tracing them to their primitive habitat.
Before then, for the sake of orderly argument, it may be
well briefly to inquire into the musical aptitude of the
Africans who created the idioms. Unfortunately, the
inquiry cannot be made as particular as might be desirable,
for want of specific evidence.
The slaves in the Southern States were an amalgamation
of peoples when the songs came into existence. Though
they are spoken of as negroes, there were many among them
who were not racially nigritians. The Slave Coast, from
which the majority of them were brought to America,
was the home of only a fraction of them. Many came from
the interior of the continent. There were some Malays
from Madagascar, some Moors from the northern portion
of the continent. Among the negroes of Africa the diver-
sities of tribe are so great that over a score of different
languages are spoken by them, to say nothing of dialects.
[ 56 ]
MUSIC AMONG THE AFRICANS
All was fish that came to the slaver’s net. Among the
Moors brought to America were men who professed the
Mahometan religion and read and wrote Arabic. It is
not impossible that to their influence in this country, or
at any rate to Moorish influence upon the tribes which
furnished the larger quota of American slaves, is due one
of the aberrations from the diatonic scale which is indi-
cated in the table — the presence of the characteristically
Oriental interval called the augmented or superfluous
second. Among the peoples who crowded the plantations
were Meens, who were of the hue of the so-called red men
of America — i. e ., copper-colored. There were also Iboes,
who had tattooed yellow skins. It does not seem to be
possible now to recall all the names of the tributary tribes — •
Congos, Agwas, Popos, Cotolies, Feedas, Socos, Awassas,
Aridas, Fonds, Nagos; — who knows now how they differed
one from another, what were their peculiarities of language
and music which may have affected the song which they
helped to create in their second home? We must, per-
force, generalize when discussing the native capacity for
music of the Africans.
Sir Richard Francis Burton, in his book on West Africa,
says of the music of the Kroomen that “it is monotonous
to a degree, yet they delight in it, and often after a long
and fatiguing day’s march will ask permission to £make
play’ and dance and sing till midnight. When hoeing the
ground they do it to the sound of music; in fact, every-
thing is cheered with a song. The traveller should never
forget to carry a tom-tom or some similar instrument, which
will shorten his journey by a fair quarter.” In his “Lake
Region of Central Africa” (page 291) Burton describes
the natives of East Africa as “admirable timists and no
mean tunists.” Wallaschek (page 140), citing Moodie,1 says:
“Another still more striking example of the Hottentots’
musical talent was related to Moodie by a German officer.
When the latter happened to play that beautifully pathetic
air of Gluck’s, ‘Che faro senza Euridice,’ on his violin, he
was surprised to observe that he was listened to by some
1 “Ten Years in South Africa,” by John W. D. Moodie, page 228.
[ 57 ]
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
Hottentot women with the deepest attention, and that some
of them were even affected to tears. In a day or two after-
ward he heard his favorite melody, with accompaniments,
all over the country wherever his wandering led him. At
first it seems astonishing that there should be Hottentots
apparently endowed with so great a musical gift; it is es-
pecially surprising to hear of their repeating the air with
accompaniments, since the German officer was certainly
not able to play both on his violin at the same time.”
Wallaschek then continues: “This statement, however,
will no longer appear to us incredible if compared with
similar examples in the accounts of some other travellers.
Theophilus Hahn, who lived in Africa for fifteen years,
tells us that his father, the missionary, used to play some
hymns before the tribe of the Nama Hottentots to the ac-
companiment of a concertina. Some days afterward they
would repeat the hymns with the Dutch words , which they
could not understand. Hahn says: “They drawl the grave
songs of the hymns, such as ‘O Haupt voll Blut und
Wunden,’ ‘Ein Lammlein geht und tragt die Schuld,’
with the same ardor as ‘O du mein lieber Augustin/1
‘My Heart’s in the Highlands’ or ‘Long, Long Ago.’ ”
This imitative capacity of the negroes frequently spoken
of by travellers is amusingly described by Albert Frieden-
thal in his book, “Musik, Tanz und Dichtung bei den
Kreolen Amerikas.” One day in October, 1898, he was
engaged in writing while sitting on his veranda at Lourengo
Marques, on the east coast of Africa. Myriads of grass-
hoppers were devasting the country, and every negro
far and near was pounding on something to drive the pests
away. The noise became unendurable, and Friedenthal
grabbed a tin plate and spoon from the hands of the first
negro he reached and cried: “If you must make a noise,
do it at least in this way!” — and he drummed out the
rhythmical motive of the Nibelungs from Wagner’s te-
tralogy. He repeated the figure two or three times. “Al-
ready the negroes in my garden imitated it; then, amused
by it, those in the neighborhood took it up, and soon one
1 The old German Landler, “0 du lieber Augustin,” is meant.
[ 58 ]
MUSIC AMONG THE AFRICANS
could hear the Nibelung rhythm by the hour all over
Delagoa Bay.”
This author makes several allusions to the innate fond-
ness of the negro for music and the influence which he has
exerted upon the art of the descendants of the Spaniards
in North and South America. On page 38 he writes:
But there is another race which has left its traces wherever it has gone —
the African negroes. As has already been remarked, they have a share in the
creation of one of the most extended forms, the Habanera. Their influence
has been strongest wherever they have been most numerously represented —
in the Antilles, on the shores of the Caribbean Sea and in Brazil. In places
where the negro has never been — in the interior of Mexico, in Argentina,
in Chili and the Cordilleran highlands — nothing of their influence is to be
observed, except that in these countries the beautiful dance of the Habanera
and numerous songs with the Habanera rhythm have effected an entrance.
On page 93 :
From a musical point of view, the influence of the African on the West
Indian Creole has been of the greatest significance, for through their coopera-
tion there arose a dance-form — the Habanera — which spread itself through
Romanic America. The essential thing in pure negro music, as is known, is
to be sought in rhythm. The melodic phrases of the negroes consist of endless
repetitions of short series of notes, so that we can scarcely speak of them as
melodies in our sense of the word. On the other hand, no European shall
escape the impression which these rhythms make. They literally bore them-
selves into the consciousness of the listener, irresistible and penetrating to
the verge of torture.
On the same page again:
Whoever knows the enthusiastic love, I might almost say the fanati-
cism, of the negro for music can easily imagine the impression which the music
of the Spaniards, especially that of the Creoles, made upon them. It can
easily be proved how much they profited by the music of the Europeans, how
gradually the sense of melody was richly developed in them, and how they
acquired and made their own the whole nature of this art without surrendering
their peculiarity of rhythm. This Europeanized negro music developed
to its greatest florescence in the south of the United States.
Friedenthal mentions a number of musicians who at-
tained celebrity, all of them of either pure or mixed African
descent. They are Jose White, Brindis de Salas, Albertini,
Gigueiroa and Adelelmo, violinists; Jimenez, pianist, and
Coleridge-Taylor, composer. Of Adelelmo he says that
though he was never heard outside of Brazil he was “an
eminent virtuoso and refined composer; and, to judge by
his surname (do Nascimento), probably the son of a former
slave.”
Wallaschek formulates his conclusion touching African
music, after considering the testimony of travellers, as
follows :
[ 59 ]
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
The general character of African music, then, is the preference for rhythm
over melody (when this is not the sole consideration); the union of song and
dance; the simplicity, not to say humbleness, of the subjects chosen; the
great imitative talent in connection .with the music and the physical excite-
ment from which it arises and to which it appears appropriate.
In this characterization he might have included at least
a rudimentary knowledge of, or feeling for, harmony. There
is evidence of a harmonic sense in the American songs
themselves, though the testimony of the original collectors
does not make it clear that the slaves sang the character-
istic refrains of their songs in parts. On this point some-
thing will have to be said presently; but the evidence of
African harmony is summarized by Wallaschek himself
in these words:
Kolbe at the beginning of the eighteenth century heard Hottentots playing
their gom-goms in harmony. “They also sang the notes of the common
chord down to the lower octave, each one beginning with the phrase whenever
the former one had already come to the second or third tone, thus producing a
harmonious effect.”1 Burchell describes the harmonious singing of the Bachapin
boys: Sometimes one of them led the band and the rest joined in at different
intervals and, guided only by the ear, attuned their voices in correct harmony.
The elder boys, whose voices were of a lower pitch, sang the bass, while the
younger produced in their turn the higher tones of the treble.2 The Bechuanas
also sing in harmony. The melody of their songs is simple enough, consisting
chiefly of ascending and descending by thirds, while the singers have a sufficient
appreciation of harmony to sing in two parts.3 Moodie tells us that he very
often heard the Hottentot servant girls singing in two parts; they even sang
European tunes which were quite new to them with the accompaniment of
a second of their own.4 The same is said by Soyaux of the negro girls of
Sierra Leone.5
Examples of harmony in the music of the Ashantees and
Fantees, from Bowditch’s “Mission from Cape Coast Castle
to Ashantee,” may be seen in the examples of African
music printed in this chapter (pp. 61-62). That the Daho-
mans, who are near neighbors of the people visited by Bow-
ditch, also employ harmony I can testify from observations
made in the Dahoman village at the World’s Columbian
Exhibition held in Chicago in 1893. There I listened re-
peatedly during several days to the singing of a Dahoman
1 Peter Kolbe, “Caput Bonae Spei Hodiernum,” Nuremburg, 1719; page
528.
2 W. T. Burchell, “Travels in the Interior of Southern Africa,” London,
1822-’24; Vol. II, page 438.
3 Ibid.
4 Op. cit. II, 227.
6 Hermann Soyaux, “Aus West-Afrika,” Leipsic, 1879; II, 174.
MUSIC AMONG THE AFRICANS
African Music
No.l. Drum Call from West Africa
No. 3. Melody from the Ba-Ronga District
No. 4. A Melody of the Hottentots
No. 8. A Melody of the Kaffirs
No. 6. A War-Dance of the Dahomans
2d Vhofns . j
Ist'Chonis*"""® '
Drums £ i*T’~T^i>~P~fl
l 61 ]
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
No. 8. Fantee Air
Specimens of African Music disclosing Elements Found in the
Songs of the Negro Slaves in America.
No.l. A drum call from West Africa, utilized by Coleridge -Taylor in “Twenty- four Negro
Melodies transcribed for the Piano” (Boston, Oliver Ditson Co.). The specimen exhibits the
rhythmical “snap” or “catch”, an exaggerated use of which has produced “rag- time”; also the
fact that African drums are sometimes tuned— No. 2. The tones given out by a zanze of
the Zulus in the posession of the author; shows the pentatonic scale with two notes strange
to the system at the end— No. 3. A pentatonic melody from“Les Chants et les Contesdes Ba*.
Ronga'/ by Henri Junod, utilized by Coleridge -Taylor, who remarked of it that It was “cer-
tainly not unworthy of any composer- from Beethoven downwards’.’ -.No. 4. A melody of the
"Hottentots, quoted by Engel in his “Introduction to the Study of National Music”. It is in
the major mode with the fourth of the scale omitted. The all-pervasive “snap” is present, as
It is in- No. 5. A Kaffir melody, also quoted by Engel; in the major mode (D) without the
leading-tone— No. 6. Music of a dance of the Dahomans heard atihe Columbia^ Exhibition
in Chicago in 1893, illustrating the employment of the flat seventh and cross* rhythms be-
tween singers and drummers— No. 7. According to Bowdich (“Mission from Cape Coast Cas-
tie to Ashantee’,’ London, 1819), the oldest air in his collection. Bowdich says:“l could trace
it through four generations, but the answer made to ray enquiries will give the best idea of its
antiquity: ’It was made when" the country was made’.” It was played on the sanko, a rude gqi-
tar. It demonstrates the use of thirds— No.8. A Fantee air from BowdichV'Missxon, etc/’, show-
ing thirds, fifths and the “snap’.’- No. 9. A Fantee dirge for flutes and instruments of percus-
sion. Also from Bowdich, who says-.“In venturing the intervening and concluding bass- chord,
I merely attempt to describe the castanets, gong-gongs, drums, etc., bursting in after tho
soft and mellow tones of the flutes; as if the ear was not to retain a vibration of the sweet
er melody”
[ 62 ]
MUSIC AMONG THE AFRICANS
Round about the Mountain
this get to going in. your mind, for it will give you no peace. It is worse than the ‘A pink trip
slip*. It seems quite high, but is the pitch in which it was sung.’*
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
minstrel who was certainly the gentlest and least assertive
person in the village, if not in the entire fair. All day long
he sat beside his little hut, a spear thrust in the ground by
his side, and sang little descending melodies in a faint high
voice, which reminded me of Dr. George Schweinfurth’s
description in his “Heart of Africa” of the minstrels of
the Niam-Niam who, he said, are “as sparing of their
voices as a worn-out prima donna,” and whose minstrelsy
might be said to have the “character of a lover’s whisper.”
To his gentle singing he strummed an unvarying accom-
paniment upon a tiny harp. This instrument, primitive
in construction (like the ancient Egyptian harps it lacked
a pole to resist the tension of the strings), was yet consider-
ably developed from an artistic point of view. It was about
two and a half feet high and had eight strings accurately
tuned according to the diatonic major system, but omitting
the fourth tone. With his right hand he played over and
over again a descending passage of dotted crochets and
quavers in thirds; with his left hand he syncopated in-
geniously on the highest two strings.
A more striking demonstration of the musical capacity
of the Dahomans was made in the war-dances which they
performed several times every forenoon and afternoon.
These dances were accompanied by choral song and the
rhythmical and harmonious beating of drums and bells, the
song being in unison. The harmony was a tonic major triad
broken up rhythmically in a most intricate and amazingly
ingenious manner. The instruments were tuned with excel-
lent justness. The fundamental tone came from a drum
made of a hollowed log about three feet long with a single
head, played by one who seemed to be the leader of the
band, though there was no giving of signals. This drum was
beaten with the palms of the hands. A variety of smaller
drums, some with one, some with two heads, were beaten
variously with sticks and fingers. The bells, four in number,
were of iron and were held mouth upward and struck with
sticks. The players showed the most remarkable rhyth-
mical sense and skill that ever came under my notice.
Berlioz in his supremest effort with his army of drummers
[ 64 ]
MUSIC AMONG THE AFRICANS
produced nothing to compare in artistic interest with the
harmonious drumming of these savages. The fundamental
effect was a combination of double and triple time, the
former kept by the singers, the latter by the drummers, but
it is impossible to convey the idea of the wealth of detail
achieved by the drummers by means of exchange of the
rhythms, syncopation of both simultaneously, and dynamic
devices. Only by making a score of the music could this
have been done. I attempted to make such a score by en-
listing the help of the late John C. Fillmore, experienced
in Indian music, but we were thwarted by the players who,
evidently divining our purpose when we took out our
notebooks, mischievously changed their manner of playing
as soon as we touched pencil to paper. I was forced to
the conclusion that in their command of the element, which
in the musical art of the ancient Greeks stood higher than
either melody or harmony, the best composers of to-day
were the veriest tyros compared with these black savages.
It would be easy to fill pages with travellers’ notes on
the drum-playing and dancing of the African tribes to
illustrate their marvellous command of rhythm. I content
myself with a few illustrative examples. African drums
are of many varieties, from the enormous war drums, for
which trunks of large trees provide the body and wild
beasts the membranes which are belabored with clubs,
down to the small vase-shaped instruments played with
the fingers. The Ashantees used their large drums to make
an horrific din to accompany human sacrifices, and large
drums, too, are used for signalling at great distances.
The most refined effects of the modern tympanist seem
to be put in the shade by the devices used by African
drummers in varying the sound of their instruments so
as to make them convey meanings, not by conventional
time-formulas but by actual imitation of words. Walla-
schek1 says:
“Peculiar to Africa is the custom of using drums as a
means of communication from great distances. There
are two distinctly different kinds of this drum language,
1 Page 112.
[ 65 ]
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
as is shown in an example by Mr. Schauenburg. 1 He saw
at Kujar a negro beating the drum with the right hand
and varying the tone by pressing his left on the skin, so
as to imitate the sound of the Mandingo words. During
the wrestling match it sounded ‘Amuta, amuta’ (attack);
during the dance ‘ali bae si/ and all the participants
understood it.2 .... Sir A. C. Moloney observed
this system of language among the Yorubas. . . and
says it is an imitation of the human voice by the drum.
To understand it one has to know ‘the accents of pro-
nunciation in the vernacular and to become capable of
recognizing the different and corresponding note of the
drum.’ ”
The art of making the drum talk is still known in the
Antilles. In “Two Years in the French West Indies,”3
Lafcadio Hearn says:
The old African dances, the Caleinda and the Bele (which latter is accom-
panied by chanted improvization), are danced on Sundays to the sound of
the drum on almost every plantation in the land. The drum, indeed, is an
instrument to which the countryfolk are so much attached that they swear
by it, Tambou! being the oath uttered upon all ordinary occasions of surprise
or vexation. But the instrument is quite as often called ka because made out
of a quarter-barrel, or quart , in the patois ka. Both ends of the barrel
having been removed, a wet hide, well wrapped about a couple of hoops, is
driven on, and in drying the stretched skin obtains still further tension. The
other end of the ka is always left open. Across the face of the skin a string is
tightly stretched, to which are attached, at intervals of about an inch apart,
very thin fragments of bamboo or cut feather stems. These lend a certain
vibration to the tones.
In the time of Pere Labat the negro drums had a somewhat different form.
There were then two kinds of drums — a big tamtam and a little one, which
used to be played together. Both consisted of skins tightly stretched over
one end of a cylinder, or a section of a hollow tree-trunk. The larger was
from three to four feet long, with a diameter of from 15 to 16 inches; the
smaller, Baboula , was of the same length, but only eight or nine inches in
diameter.
The skilful player ( bel tambouye), straddles his ka stripped to the waist,
and plays upon it with the finger-tips of both hands simultaneously, taking
care that the vibrating string occupies a horizontal position. Occasionally
the heel of the naked foot is pressed lightly or vigorously against the skin
so as to produce changes of tone. This is called “giving heel” to the drum —
bailly talon. Meanwhile a boy keeps striking the drum at the uncovered
end with a stick, so as to produce a dry, clattering accompaniment. The
sound of the drum itself, well played, has a wild power that makes and masters
all the excitement of the dance — a complicated double roll, with a peculiar
1 Eduard Schauenburg, “Reisen in Central-Afrika,” etc. Lahr, 1859, I, 93.
2 Sir Alfred Moloney, “Notes on Yoruba and the Colony and Protectorate
of Lagos,” in The Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society, New Series,
XII, 596.
3 Harper & Bros.; 1890.
[ 66 ]
MUSIC AMONG THE AFRICANS
billowy rising and falling. The creole onomatopes, b’lip-b’lip-b’lip-b’lip,
do not fully render the roll; for each stands really for a series of sounds too
rapidly flipped out to be imitated by articulate speech. The tapping of a
ka can be heard at surprising distances; and experienced players often play
for hours at a time without exhibiting wearisomeness, or in the least diminish-
ing the volume of sound produced.
It seems that there are many ways of playing — different measures familiar
to all these colored people, but not easily distinguished by anybody else; and
there are great matches sometimes between celebrated tambouye. The same
commande whose portrait I took while playing told me that he once figured
in a contest of this kind, his rival being a drummer from the neighboring
burgh of Marigot. . . .
“Ate, ate , ate! mon che — y fat tambou-a pale!” said the commande , describing
the execution of his antagonist; “my dear, he just made that drum talk!
I thought I was going to be beaten for sure; I was trembling all the time —
die , yaie, ydie! Then he got off that ka. I mounted it; I thought a moment;
then I struck up the ‘River-of-the-Lizard’ — mais , mon che , yon larivie-Leza
toutt pi! such a ‘River-of-the-Lizard,’ ah! just perfectly pure! I gave heel
to that ka; — I worried that ka; I made it mad; I made it crazy; I made it
talk; I won!”
In Unyanebe, James Augustus Grant says, the large drum
is played by the leader, while a youth apparently rattled a
roll like the boy in Hearn’s description. In my notebook I
find a postcard, written by Hearn from New Orleans thirty
years ago, which indicates that the manner of drumming
described by Grant and also in the above excerpt was also
common in Louisiana. Hearn writes: “The Voudoo, Congo
and Caleinda dances had for orchestra the empty wooden
box or barrel drum, the former making a dry, rapid rattle
like castanets. The man sat astride the drum.” Max
Buchner1 says that the drummer in Kamerun does not beat
the time, but a continuous roll, the time being marked by
the songs of the spectators. An example of the harmonious
drumming such as I heard in the Dahoman village is men-
tioned by Hermann Wissmann in his book “Unter deut-
scher Flagge durch Afrika,”2 who says that “when the chief
of the Bashilange received the European visitors he was
accompanied in his movements by a great drum with a
splendid bass tone. When he declared friendship four
well-tuned drums began to play, while the assembly sang
a melody of seven tones, repeating it several times.”3
The musical instruments used in Africa do not call for
extended study or description here, since their structure
1 “Kamerun,” Leipsic, 1887, page 29.
2 Berlin, 1889, page 72.
3 Wallaschek, page 115.
f 67 1
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
has had nothing to do with influencing the forms of Afro-
American folksong. The drum has received such extended
attention only because it plays so predominant a role in
the music of America as well as Africa. As the rhythmical
figure which is characteristic of the Habanera (which dance
Friedenthal asserts is indubitably of African origin) domin-
ates the dance-melodies of Spanish America, so the “snap”
which I have found in 315 of the 527 melodies analyzed,
in its degenerate form of “ragtime” now dominates the
careless music of two great countries — the United States
and England.
Two instruments which would have been of incalculable
value in determining the prevalent intervallic systems of
African music, had the travellers who have described them
been musically scientific enough to tell us how they were
tuned, are the marimba and the zanze, both of which are
found widely distributed over the Dark Continent. In these
instruments the tone-producing agency is fixed when they
are made and remains unalterable. The marimba, which
has become a national instrument in Mexico, is an instru-
ment of the xylophone type, the tones of which are struck
out of sonorous bars of wood and intensified by means
of dry calabashes of various sizes hung under the bars.
The accounts of this instrument given by travellers do not
justify an attempt to record its tunings. The zanze is
a small sound-box, sometimes reinforced by a calabash
or a block of wood hollowed out in the form of a round
gourd, to the upper side of which, over a bridge, are tightly
affixed a series of wooden or metal tongues of different
lengths. The tongues are snapped with the thumbs, the
principle involved being that of the familar music-box, and
give out a most agreeable sound. I find no record'in the
accounts of travellers as to any systematic tuning of the in-
strument, but a specimen from Zululand in my possession is
accurately tuned to the notes of the pentatonic scale, with
the addition of two erratic tones side by side in the middle
of the instrument — a fact which invites speculation.
In the table showing the results of an analysis of 527
songs, seven variations from the normal, or conventional,
f 68 1
MUSIC AMONG THE AFRICANS
diatonic major and minor scales were recorded, besides
the songs which were set down as of mixed or vague tonality.
They were (i) the major scale, with the seventh depressed
a semitone, i.e., flatted; (2) the major scale, without
the seventh or leading-tone; (3) the major scale, without
the fourth; (4) the major scale, without either seventh of
fourth (the pentatonic scale); (5) the minor scale, with
a raised or major sixth; (6) the minor scale, without the
sixth, and (7) the minor scale, with the raised seventh —
the so-called harmonic minor. Their variations or aber-
rations shall occupy our attention in the next chapter.
For the majority of them I have found prototypes in
African music, as appears from the specimens printed in
this chapter.
I 69 ]
CHAPTER VI
VARIATIONS FROM THE
MAJOR SCALE
Peculiarities of Negro Singing — Vagueness of Pitch
in Certain Intervals — Fractional Tones in
Primitive Music— The Pentatonic Scale — The
Flat Seventh — Harmonization of Negro
Melodies
Of the 527 songs examined I have set down in my table
331 as being in the major mode. To these, as emphasizing
the essentially energetic and contented character of Afro-
American music, notwithstanding that it is the fruit of
slavery, must be added m which are pentatonic. Of
the 331 major songs twenty, or a trifle more than one-
sixteenth, have a flat seventh; seventy-eight — that is,
one fourth — have no seventh, and forty-five, or nearly
one-seventh, have no fourth. Fourth and seventh are
the tones which are lacking in the pentatonic scale, and
the songs without one or the other of them approach the
pentatonic songs in what may be called their psychological
effect. These are the only variations of the major scale
which can be set down as characteristic of the songs. In
the case of the songs in the minor mode, eight, a fraction
under one-eighth, have a major sixth; over one-half have
no sixth at all, and over one-third have the leading-tone
(major seventh), which is not an element of the minor
scale proper, but with the major sixth has been admitted
through the use of accidentals to what musicians call the
harmonic minor scale. In the case of twenty-three songs
I have set down the mode as mixed or vague, because the
scales do not conform to either the major or minor system,
but, in part, to both, or have elements which are obviously
sporadic.
It is necessary for a correct understanding of the nature
of negro songs that the testimony of the collectors touch-
[ 70 ]
VARIATIONS FROM THE MAJOR SCALE
ing some of these aberrant intervals be heard. As I have
set them down, the flat seventh in the major and major
sixth in the minor are more or less approximations to the
tones as they are sung; but the circumstances justify
the classifications which I have made. In my own
defence, though it may not be necessary to make one,
I may say that here I am entirely dependent upon the
evidence adduced by others; I did not hear the songs
sung in slavery, nor did I come in closer touch with
the generation which made them generally known than
many of my readers who heard the Jubilee Singers
of Fisk University on their first concert tour. It was
their singing which interested me in the subject, and
it was forty years ago that I began my observations,
which I was not permitted to extend personally into
the regions where research should have been made, and
where I vainly tried to have it made through other agencies.
“It is difficult,” said Miss McKim,1 “to express the
entire character of these negro ballads by mere musical
notes and signs. The odd turns made in the throat and
the curious rhythmic effect produced by single voices
chiming in at different irregular intervals seem almost as
impossible to place on the score as the singing of birds or
the tones of an seolian harp.”
“Another obstacle to its rendering is the fact that tones
are frequently employed which we havenomusicalcharacters
to represent. Such, for example, is that which I have indi-
cated as nearly as possible by the flat seventh in ‘Great
Camp Meetin’, ‘Hard Trials/ and others,” says Thomas
P. Fenner, in the preface to “Cabin and Plantation Songs,”
and he continues: “These tones are variable in pitch,
ranging through an entire interval on different occasions,
according to the inspiration of the singer. They are rarely
discordant, and even add a charm to the performance.”
Miss Emily HallowelPs “Calhoun Plantation Songs” bear
evidence of having been more carefully noted than the
Fisk or Hampton collections, though made at a much later
date. In her preface Miss Hallowell says: “I have tried
1 “Slave Songs,” page 6.
[ 71 ]
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
to write them down just as they were sung, retaining
all the peculiarities of rhythm, melody, harmony and text;
but those who have heard these or other like songs sung
by the colored people of the South will realize that it is
impossible to more than suggest their beauty and charm;
they depend so largely upon the quality of voice, the un-
erring sense of rhythm and the quaint religious spirit
peculiar to the colored people who have spent their lives
on Alabama cotton plantations, untouched by civilization.”
Miss Mildred J. Hill, of Louisville, who gathered for me
some of the most striking songs in my collection from the
singing of an old woman who had been a slave in Boyle
County, Ky., was careful to note all deviations from just
intonation, and from her songs I came to the conclusion
that the negroes were prone to intervallic aberrations,
not only in the case of the seventh, but also in the third.
This is a common phenomenon in folk-music. It was the
observation of the composer Spohr that rural people intone
the third rather sharp, the fourth still sharper, and the
seventh rather flat. Vagaries of this kind emphasize the fact
that the diatonic scale — the tempered scale, at any rate —
as used in artistic music is a scientific evolution, and not
altogether a product of nature, as some persons assume, who
in consequence attribute the slightest fractional variation
from its tones to exquisite appreciation of tonal differences.
The speculations on this point in which some professed
students of the music of the North American Indians
have indulged have reached a degree of absurdity almost
laughable. In one case changes of pitch, which were
most obviously the result of differences of speed in the
revolution of the cylinder of the phonograph used in the
collection of Zuni songs, were gravely declared to be evi-
dence of a musical sense which could not be satisfied with
the semitones of civilized musicians. The melodies had
been recorded by treadle power and transmitted for no-
tation by electric. To prove the valuelessness of music
thus obtained I experimented with a pitch-pipe and a
phonograph, and by varying the speed of the revolutions
of the cylinder in making the record easily ran the pitch
[ 72 ]
VARIATIONS FROM THE MAJOR SCALE
of my C up and down an octave like the voice of a siren.
Why savages who have never developed a musical or any
other art should be supposed to have more refined aesthetic
sensibilities than the peoples who have cultivated music
for centuries, passes my poor powers of understanding.
But the contemplation of savage life seems to have a
tendency to make the imagination (especially that of
sympathetic people) slip its moorings. My own experience
with Indian music has convinced me that the red man
is markedly unmusical. That appears to me to be amply
proved by the paucity of melody in the songs of the Indians,
their adherence to a stereotyped intervallic formula, regard-
less of the use to which the song is put, and their lack of
agreement in pitch when singing. To the Indian music is
chiefly an element of ritual; its practice is obligatory, and
it is not per se an expression of beauty for beauty’s sake
or an emotional utterance which a love for euphony has
regulated and moulded into a thing of loveliness. It reaches
its climax in the wild and monotonous chants which
accompany their gambling games and their ghost-dances.
There is a significance which I cannot fathom in the
circumstance that the tones which seem rebellious to the
negro’s sense of intervallic propriety are the fourth and
seventh of the diatonic major series and the fourth, sixth
and seventh of the minor. The omission of the fourth and
seventh intervals of the major scale leaves the pentatonic
series on which mofthe 527 songs analyzed are built.
The fact is an evidence of the strong inclination of the
American negroes toward this scale, which is even more
pervasive in their music than it is in the folksongs of
Scotland, popularly looked upon as peculiarly the home
of the pentatonic scale. On this imperfect scale the
popular music of China, Japan and Siam rests; it is
common, too, in the music of Ireland, and I have found
many examples in the music of the American Indians
and the peoples of Africa. The melody of the “Warrior’s
Song” in Coleridge-Taylor’s fine book of pianoforte tran-
scriptions entitled “Twenty-four Negro Melodies,”1 is a
1 Boston: Oliver Ditson Company.
[ 73 ]
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
pentatonic tune from the Ba-Ronga country, and Cole-
ridge-Taylor says of it that its subject “is certainly not
unworthy of any composer — from Beethoven downward.
It is at once simple, strong and noble, and probably stands
higher than any other example of purely ‘savage’ music in
these respects.” Except that it lent itself so admirably
to artistic treatment, I cannot see why this melody should
have been singled out by Mr. Coleridge-Taylor for such
extraordinary praise; many of the American slave songs
are equally simple, strong and noble and more beautiful.
Yet it is a specially welcome example because it comes
from Africa.
The temptation is strong to look upon the pentatonic
scale as the oldest, as it certainly is the most widespread
and the most serviceable, of intervallic systems. It is the
scale in which melody may be said to be naturally innate.
Play it at random on the black keys of the pianoforte,
and so you keep symmetry of period and rhythm in mind
you cannot help producing an agreeable melody; and it will
be pentatonic. (See “Nobody Knows de Trouble I’ve
Seen,” page 75.)
The history of the pentatonic scale has baffled investi-
gators, for it is older than history. China has a musical
instrument called hiuen , the invention of which is said
(fantastically, no doubt) to date back to B. C. 2800. It
emits only the live tones of the pentatonic scale. Instru-
ments with the same limitations and qualities have been
found among the remains of the lost civilizations of Mexico
and Peru, and are still in existence in Nubia and Abyssinia.
I have mentioned a Zulu zanze which is in my possession —
a little instrument so stoutly built that it is likely to survive
centuries. It has pentatonic tuning down to two middle
tongues, which emit strangely aberrant tones. The key is
D-flat. The tongues on one side emit the descending order,
D-flat, E-flat and B-flat; on the other, B-flat, F, D-flat and
A-flat. The instrument is played by plucking and snap-
ping the metal tongues with the thumbs; any two plucked
by a thumb simultaneously produce an agreeable con-
cord. Between the right and left rows of tongues lie
[ 74 ]
VARIATIONS FROM THE MAJOR SCALE
Nobody Knows de Trouble I’ve Seen
l 75 ]
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
the two which give out the strange, wild notes A and B.
How these tones were melodically introduced only a musi-
cian hearing the instrument played by a native could tell.
In an article on Scottish music in Grove’s “Dictionary
of Music and Musicians” Mr. Frank Kidson observes
that “whether this pentatonic series was acquired through
the use of a defective instrument, or from the melodic
taste of a singer or player, must remain mere matter of
conjecture.” Scarcely, so far as its hypothetical instru-
mental origin is concerned. The first melodies were
vocal, and among primitive peoples instruments are made
for the music — not music for the instruments. Defects
in instruments are the results of faulty adjustments of
mechanical means to desired ends. Prehistoric whistles,
with finger-holes to produce five tones only, were made
so that melodies with five tones might be played on them.
The melodies were not invented because the makers of
the whistles neglected to make a larger number of finger-
holes or to dispose them differently.
Many years ago the Rev. Dr. Wentworth, the editor of
“The Ladies’ Repository,” a magazine published by the
Methodist Episcopal Church, who had been a missionary
in China, told me that he had observed that his congrega-
tion became singularly and unaccountably dissonant at
certain places in every hymn-tune adopted from the
Methodist hymnal. When I told him that the Chinese,
while admitting the theoretical existence of the fourth
and seventh intervals of the diatonic scale, eschewed them
in practice, and asked him whether or not they had been
the troublesome tones, he expressed the opinion that I had
explained a fact which he had looked upon as inexplicable.
Not having made the experiment myself, I could not say
whether or not he was right; but it is certainly conceivable
that centuries of habit might atrophy the musical faculty
of a people so as to make the production of a tone as part
of an intervallic system difficult and lead to its modification
when occasion called for its introduction. In some such
manner it is not unlikely that the flat seventh of the major
scale in the music of the American negroes may be ac-
[ 76 ]
VARIATIONS FROM THE MAJOR SCALE
counted for. This, however, is a mere hypothesis. Though
not a common feature of the folksongs of other peoples,
it does occur here. It is found in a Servian kolo dance
printed by Engel in his “Introduction to the Study of
National Music,” and also in some Arabic tunes. Students
of the old ecclesiastical modes recognize it as an element
of the Mixolydian mode, with its intervals G, A, B, C, D,
E and F-natural.
Whether the employment of the flat seventh is due to
an innate harmonic sense on the part of its users, which
sometimes discloses itself very markedly in an evident
feeling for the subdominant relationship, or is a purely
melodic factor (as in Gregorian music), is a question which
I shall not undertake to determine. In the case of a very
stirring hymn, “Dere’s a Great Campmeetin’ ” (see page
78), the harmonic impulse seems to me most obvious,
though there is no other song which I have found in which
the flat seventh strikes the ear with such barbaric force
as it does in this. Here the first section of the melody
closes with a perfect cadence in the key of E-flat; the
second section begins abruptly with an apparently unrelated
shout on D-flat — “Gwine to mourn, and nebber tire” —
which leads directly, as the effect shows, into the key of
A-flat, the subdominant of E-flat. The transition has
a singularly bright and enlivening effect and the return
to the original key is easy and natural.
The specimen illustrating the use of the flat seventh
given in the examples of African prototypes in the pre-
ceding chapter was noted at the Chicago World’s Fair
by Heinrich Zoellner, the German composer. I was never
fortunate enough in my visits to the Dahoman Village
to hear the dancers sing. Mr. Zoellner witnessed two choral
dances and wrote down the vocal music, which he placed
at my disposal. In the first dance the Dahomans sang
a slow phrase of two measures in C major without the
seventh over and over again, while the band drummed in
double time and the dancers advanced and retreated
without particular regard to the rhythm, some individuals
indulging in fancy steps ad lib . Then there came a change
[ 77 ]
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
A Great Campmeetin’
Oh, walk to-ged-der, chil - dren, Don’t you get - a >wear- y,
mourn an’ nebher tire; Dere’s a great campmeet-in’ in de promised land}
w v'
J ^ ■■■ gi -
' p
r w
• •
feet produced by the flat seventh.
[ 78 ]
VARIATIONS FROM THE MAJOR SCALE
of tempo and rhythm, and also in the manner of singing
and dancing. The drummers changed from double to
compound-triple time, the singers separated into two
choirs and sang the antiphonal Allegro phrase printed in
the table of examples, and began to keep step with absolute
precision.
In what key is this phrase? Not in C minor, as the
prevalence of C, E-flat and G would seem to suggest at
first sight; the A is too disturbing for that. But if one
should conceive the phrase as being in F, the explanation
is at hand. Then it will be seen that the phrase illustrates
the use of the flat seventh. This E-flat is now felt as
the essential element of the dominant seventh-chord of the
subdominant key, B-flat. In “A Great Campmeetin’ 99
the corresponding tone leads into this key as the song is
sung and as it appears in the books; but it must be observed
that the harmonization was made by Mr. Fenner, who
has not told us to what extent he received hints from his
singers. The Dahomans seemed satisfied to treat the E-flat
as a grace-note and found gratification for their sense of
repose in the F major triad suggested by the concluding
C. When I consulted Mr. Arthur Mees, who gave parti-
cular attention to the ecclesiastical modes when a student
of Weitzmann, in Berlin, as to his opinion on the subject
under consideration, he wrote me: “The use of the flat
seventh seems to be quite common to old melodies. Just
such a one as you quote as being Dahoman I found in an
attempted deciphering of Hebrew melodies from Hebrew
accents. It is, I think, true that the dropping into the
subdominant is a sort of relaxation of musical fancy ( Vor -
stellung), while modulation into the dominant is a climb-
ing up process, which can be accomplished by not less
than two chords. (I mean two different roots.) I do not
feel a modulation with the introduction of the low seventh,
but a melodic peculiarity which is enforced and made
piquant by the mental effort (unconscious) to retain the
original tonality after the flat seventh has been heard.” Mr.
Mees added that he felt the scale of the phrase just as he
felt the scale of the Mixolydian mode.
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
Weeping Mary
Arranged for men’s voices by Arthur Mees, for the Mendelssohn Glee Club of New York. By
permission.
[ 80 ]
VARIATIONS FROM THE MAJOR SCALE
Some time afterward Mr. Mees arranged several negro
songs for men’s voices and performed them at a concert
of the Mendelssohn Glee Club of New York. One of them
was “Weeping Mary,” which is reproduced in this chapter.
(See page 80.) This brought the topic of how the negro
songs ought to and might be harmonized into discussion,
and Mr. Mees wrote me:
It is a most interesting subject. The first question that arises in examining
a tone-succession so strange to us is this: Did the people to whom a particular
one is credited intuitively feel a harmonic substratum to the melodies they
invented? So far as the negroes are concerned, I believe that the intuition
of harmony was peculiar to them. I have spoken with many Southern
people, and they all speak of the love of harmony that is peculiar to the
negroes. If that is true, the altered tones they introduce in the scales on
which their melodies are constructed have a harmonic significance, and the
frequent introduction of a minor seventh would point to a tendency toward
the subdominant, as you suggest. This would be true of melodies in the
major mode only, for the seventh in the minor mode, according to Weitzmann
and his followers, is the normal tone in the minor mode, and the large seventh
the variant, introduced because of the requirement in modern music of the
leading-tone to make the cadence authoritative. . . .
In “Weeping Mary,” which in my arrangement is in G minor, the E
natural is very interesting and produces a fine effect. It is the raised sixth
in minor. Ziehn in his “Harmonielehre” quotes a striking example of the
same progression from Beethoven.
Mr. Mees’s letter has brought us around again to the
subject of the use of harmony in the Afro-American folk-
songs. In “Slave Songs of the United States” the tunes
only are printed, and of their performance Mr. Allen said
in his preface:
There is no singing in farts , as we understand it, and yet no two appear
to be singing the same thing; the leading singer starts the words of each verse,
often improvising, and the others, who “base” him, as it is called, strike in
with the refrain, or even join in the solo when the words are familiar. When
the “base” begins the leader often stops, leaving the rest of the words to
be guessed at, or it may be they are taken up by one of the other singers.
And the “basers” themselves seem to follow their own whims, beginning when
they please and leaving off when they please, striking an octave above or
below (in case they have pitched the tune too high), or hitting some other
note that chords, so as to produce the effect of a marvellous complication and
variety and yet with the most perfect time and rarely with any discord. And
what makes it all the harder to unravel a thread of melody out of this strange
network is that, like birds, they seem not infrequently to strike sounds that
cannot be precisely represented by the gamut and abound in “slides from one
note to another and turns and cadences not in articulated notes.”
The peculiar style of singing described in the concluding
words has been made familiar by several singers who have
used the songs on the concert platform, particularly by Mrs.
I 81 ]
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
Jeannette Robinson Murphy. In a personal letter to the
writer, dated July 1 6, 1913, Miss Emily Hallowed says
of her book:
I have always thought that the time would come when some student
would find the “Calhoun Collection” of greater service than most of the
other publications, for two reasons: As far as my ability allowed they were
written precisely as they were sung, while in most collections they have been
arranged for ordinary quartet singing; and as the people of Calhoun are so
much more remote than in most localities, their singing in 1900 was almost
exactly as it was before the war. . . . I got most of the songs from young
people, too young to remember slavery, but I have heard many of them sung
by the old people, and the melodies were the same, but the harmonies I have
written were all taken from the pupils in the Calhoun school. The old people’s
harmonies seem to arise from each holding to their own version of the melodies
or from limitation of compass.
I have cited instances of the employment of harmony
in Africa. In my notebook I hnd an interesting example,
which I obtained from Mr. George L. White, teacher and
manager of the Jubilee Singers after their return from their
memorable trip to Germany in 1877. It is a hymn which
Dr. Wangemann heard sung, with great effect, as he
testified, by a congregation of three hundred Kaffirs in a
Presbyterian mission in Emgravali. Its composition was
attributed to a Kaffir named U-Utrikana, the first member
of his tribe to embrace Christianity, who became a sort
of black Sankey and travelled all over his country as a
singing evangelist. “He was honored as a prophet by his
people,” wrote Dr. Wangemann on the transcript of the
hymn which he made from memory for Mr. White. What
the words mean I do not know, but musically the song
consists of two solos and refrains, the solos sung in unison,
the refrains in full harmony, consisting of the tonic and
dominant triads. As a rule, the songs of the Afro-Americans
are so obviously built on a harmonic basis and show so
plainly the influence of civilized music that I have no
doubt the majority of them were sung in simple harmony —
at least the refrains. The phrases containing the “wild
notes,” as I call them, were just as certainly sung in
unison and are most effective when left without har-
mony, as is the rule (though I have made a few exceptions)
in this collection.
[ 82 ]
CHAPTER VII
MINOR VARIATIONS
AND CHARACTERISTIC RHYTHMS
Vagaries in the Minor Scale — The Sharp Sixth —
Orientalism — The “Scotch” Snap — A Note on
the Tango Dance — Even and Uneven Meas-
ures— Adjusting Words and Music
The frequent aberrations from the major scale in the
songs of the American negroes, which I have pointed out,
serve effectually to disprove Wallaschek’s contention that
they are nothing more than imitations of European songs —
“unmistakably arranged” or “ignorantly borrowed” from
the national songs of European peoples. There is but one
body of specifically national song with which the slave of
the United States could by any possibility have become
familiar — the Scottish, with its characteristic pentatonic
scale and rhythmical snap; but the singing of Scottish
ballads was not so general in the South that their pecu-
liarities could become the common property of the field-
hands on the plantations. The negroes in the Antilles
and South America were in a very different case. Reci-
procal influences were stronger there, where social lines
were more loosely drawn and where the races amalgamated
to an extent which threatened the institution of slavery
itself; but even there the impress of African music is
unmistakable and indelible. Spanish melody has been
imposed on African rhythm. In the United States the
rhythmical element, though still dominant, has yielded
measurably to the melodic, the dance having given
way to religious worship, sensual bodily movement to
emotional utterance.
The demonstration of independence of European in-
fluence is still more striking in the case of the minor songs
and those of mixed or vague tonality. The variations
from the minor scale which I have classified are those dis-
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
closing the major seventh (the leading- tone), the use
of the major sixth and the absence of the sixth. Other
aberrations are not pronounced enough to justify being
set down as characteristic features.
There is no special significance in the prevalence of the
leading-tone in minor melodies (it was found in nineteen
songs out of sixty- two), beyond the evidence which it may
offer of the influence of the European system in which the
seventh step of the minor scale is arbitrarily raised a semi-
tone for the sake of a satisfactory harmonic cadence. To
avoid the abnormal interval of a second consisting of
three semitones European theorists also raise the sixth,
thus obtaining the conventional ascending minor scale —
the melodic minor. It cannot be without significance
that what I am prone to consider a primitive melodic
sense seems to have led the negroes to rebel at this pro-
cedure. In thirty-four out of sixty-two minor melodies
the troublesome sixth (the avoided fourth in the major
mode) is omitted entirely, and in eight it is raised to a
major interval without disturbing the seventh. The major
sixth in the minor mode presents itself as an independent
melodic element, the effect of which is most potently felt
when it is left unharmonized — which is not the case in one
of the illustrative examples which I present.1 The minor
tunes with the major sixth are thus without the leading-
tone, and the physiological effect of the errant interval is
even more striking than the flat seventh in the major tunes.
No one who heard Miss Jackson, the contralto of the
original Fisk Jubilee choir, sing “You May Bury Me in
the East,”2 without accompaniment of any sort, is likely
to have forgotten the clarion sound of her voice on the
word “trumpet.” This was the only song of its kind in
the repertory of the Jubilee Singers, the other minor songs
either having no sixth or having the leading-tone. A fine
example in my manuscript collection excited the admira-
tion of M. Tiersot, who sets it down in his brochure as an
illustration of the first Gregorian tone. It is a revival
hymn, “Come tremble-ing down,” and in it the “wood-
1 See “Come tremble-ing down,” page 85.
8 See page 86.
[ 84 ]
MINOR VARIATIONS; CHARACTERISTIC RHYTHMS
“Come trembleing down”
A spiritual from Boyle Co., Kentucky, transcribed from the singing of a former slave for
the author by Miss Mildred J. Hill, of Louisville. A fine example of the raised sixth in the
minor mode. Arranged by the author.
[ 85 J
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
You May Bury Me in de Eas’
Lento
r-rr-V-
r\
n\
i i 1 ■*&&& 3 1 Jl ^ g J • :=?=f
1. You may bur-y mein de Eas’, you may bur -y me in de Wes’, But 1 11
, /T\
In dat mornin’.
You may bury him, etc.
4. Good ole preachers in dat day,
Dey’ll take wings, etc.
5. In dat dreadful judgmen’ day
I’ll take wing-s, etc.
Melody from“The Story of the Jubilee Singers”; arrangement for this work by H.T. Bur-
leigh. One of the finest examples extant of the effect of the major sixth in the minor mode.
[ 86 ]
MINOR VARIATIONS; CHARACTERISTIC RHYTHMS
note wild” has a barbaric shout of jubilation to which
correct verbal accent has been sacrificed:
Come tremble-ing down, go shouting home,
Safe in the sweet arms of Jesus.
’Twas just about the break of day
King Jesus stole my heart away.
Concerning the text of this song it may be said that it
is scarcely to be wondered at that the amorous sentiment
of many Methodist and Baptist revival hymns finds its
echo in the hymns of the negroes.
The interval containing three semitones, which the in-
ventors of modern Occidental harmony avoided by arbi-
trary alteration of the minor scale, is so marked an element
in the music of Southeastern Europe and Western Asia
that the scale on which much of this music is based is
called the Oriental scale in the books. It is found in the
melodies of the Arabs, of the peoples of the Balkan penin-
sula, of the Poles and Magyars. The ancient synagogal
hymns of the Jews are full of it. In some cases it results
from raising the fourth interval of the minor scale; in
others from raising the seventh. In many cases, of which
the “Rakoczy March” is a familiar and striking example,
the interval occurs twice. The peculiar wailing effect of
the Oriental scale, most noticeable when the intervals are
sounded in descending order, is also to be heard in the song
of the priestesses and their dance in “Aida” and in Rubin-
stein’s song, “Der Asra.”
One of the songs in my manuscript collection shows a
feeling for the augmented, or superfluous second, as
Engel calls it, though the interval is not presented directly
to the eye or ear because of the absence of a tone which is
a constituent part of it — the sixth. It is the baptismal
hymn, “Freely Go” (see page 88), which makes a startling
effect with its unprepared beginning on the leading-tone.
An instance of the creation of the interval by the raising
of the fourth is found in the extremely interesting song
“Father Abraham,” in the arrangement of which Mr.
Burleigh has retained the effect of a unique choral ac-
companiment as sung at the Calhoun school. (See page 90.)
Notable, too, in this song is the appreciation of tone-
[ 87 ]
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
Baptizing Hymn
Allegro moderato
[ 88 ]
MINOR VARIATIONS; CHARACTERISTIC RHYTHMS
From Boyle Co., Kentucky. Collected for the author by Miss Mildred J. Hill, of Louisville;
harmonized by Henry Holden Huss. An extraordinary instance of a feeling for the scale of
Oriental peoples, with its augmented second. The effect of this interval may be observedby
sounding D-$harp, C and B at the beginning. The interval of the sixth, C, is sedulously avoid*
ed in the minor portion of the melody.
I 89 ]
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
Father Abraham
“Tell it”
’Way up on
y - Trp
de
moun-tain -
top;
My Lord £
spoke an’ de
TeU it,
tell it,
tell it,
tell it,
tell it,
Mil
teU it,
dty
Words and melody from “Calhoun Plantation Songs". Collected and edited by Emily Hal -
loWell (Boston, C. W. Thompson & Co.). Published here by permission. Arranged by H.T. Bur-
leigh. An example of the use of the Oriental interval called the augmented, or superfluous sec-
ond (Cft- B!>).
[ 90 j
MINOR VARIATIONS; CHARACTERISTIC RHYTHMS
painting exemplified in the depiction of the sojourn on the
mountain-top by persistent reiteration of the highest note
reached by the melody.
I have no disposition to indulge in speculations touching
the origin of either the conventional scales or the departures
from them which I have pointed out in these songs. There
are other variations, but they do not present themselves
in sufficient numbers or in a sufficiently marked manner
to justify their discussion as characteristic of the music
of the people who employed them. They may be sporadic
and due only to some personal equation in the singer who
sang them to the collector. In no case, however, do they
occur in songs which are commonplace in structure or
sentiment. I should like to say that the melodies which
seem to be based on the Oriental scale prove the persistence
in the Afro-American folksongs of an element, or idiom, re-
tained from their original Eastern home or derived from
intercourse between the ancestors of the black slaves and
some of the peoples of western Asia to whom the scale is
native; but to make such an assertion would be unscientific;
we lack the support here of such a body of evidence as we
have to prove the African origin of the aberrations from the
major scale which I have discussed. Nevertheless, it is
significant in my eyes that the few songs which were
gathered for me by Miss Hill in Kentucky and the songs
collected by Miss Hallowell also presented themselves
to the apprehension, though not to the comprehension, of
the collectors of the “Slave Songs of the United States.”
The intermediate collectors — those who made the Fisk
and Hampton collections — having a more popular purpose
in view were, I fear, indifferent to their value and beauty.
It is a pity that students are without adequate material
from which the natural history of the scales might be
deduced — a pity and a wrong. Governments and scien-
tific societies backed by beneficent wealth are spending
enormous sums in making shows out of our museums.
For these shows men go to Africa actuated by the savage
propensity to kill, and call its gratification scientific re-
search. Who has gone to Africa to capture a melody? No
[ 91 ]
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
one. Yet a few scores or hundreds of phonographic records
of music would be worth more to science and art to-day
than a thousand stuffed skins of animals robbed of life
by the bullets of a Roosevelt.
It is unfortunate that musical scholars are unable, for
want of material, to deduce a sound theory concerning
the origin of the scale; it is also unfortunate that a knowl-
edge of African languages and dialects does not come to
our assistance in accounting for the most marked rhyth-
mical characteristic of the songs of the American negroes.
This characteristic is found in the use of a figure in which
the emphasis is shifted from the strong to the weak part
of a time-unit by making the first note of two into which
the beat is divided take only a fraction of the time of the
second. This effect of propulsion when frequently repeated
becomes very stirring, not to say exciting, and, as has been
disclosed by the development of “ragtime,” leads to a
sort of rhythmical intoxication exemplified in the use of
the device not only in the first beat of a measure, but in the
other beats also, and even in the fractional divisions of a
beat, no matter how small they have been made. When
this species of syncopation, known as the Scotch, or
Scot’s, snap, or catch, became popular in the Italian opera
airs of the eighteenth century it was held to be the offspring
of a device commonly found in the popular music of
Scotland. It is a characteristic element of the Strathspey
reel, and the belief has been expressed that it got into
vocal music from the fact that Burns and other poets wrote
words for Scottish dance-tunes. “It was in great favor
with many of the Italian composers of the eighteenth
century,” says J. Muir Wood (writing in Grove’s “Diction-
ary of Music and Musicians”), “for Burney, who seems to
have invented the name, says in his account of the Italian
opera in London, in 1748, that There was at this time too
much of the Scotch catch, or cutting short of the first
two notes in a melody.’ He blames Cocchi, Perez and
Jommelli, all three masters concerned in the opera ‘Volo-
geso,’ for being lavish of the snap.” Adding to his article
on the subject in the second edition of Grove’s work, he
[ 92 ]
MINOR VARIATIONS; CHARACTERISTIC RHYTHMS
says: “In the hands of Hook and other purveyors of the
psuedo-Scottish music which was in vogue at Vauxhall
and elsewhere in the eighteenth century, it became a
senseless vulgarism, and, with the exception of a few songs
a . . and the Strathspey reel, in which it is an essen-
tial feature, its presence may generally be accepted as
proof that the music in which it occurs is not genuine.”
What Wood here remarks about the pseudo-Scotch
music of the eighteenth century as it was cultivated in the
music halls may be said of latter-day “ragtime,” which,
especially in the “turkey-trot” and “tango” dances,
monopolizes the music almost to the exclusion of melody
and harmony. There is no reason why drums and gongs
should not give these dances all the musical impulse they
need. Though it is at the expense of a digression, it is
not out of place to point out that in this year of pretended
refinement, which is the year of our Lord 1913, the dance
which is threatening to force grace, decorum and decency
out of the ballrooms of America and England is a survival
of African savagery, which was already banished from the
plantations in the days of slavery. It was in the dance
that the bestiality of the African blacks found its frankest
expression. The Cuban Habanera, which has an African
rhythmical foundation (the melodic superstructure having
been reared by the white natives of the southern countries
of America), grew into the most graceful and most polite
of the creole dances. Concerning it and its depraved
ancestor, the tango, Friedenthal says in his “Musik, Tanz
und Dichtung bei den Kreolen Amerikas”:
But the habanera is not only danced by the cultivated creoles, but also
by preference in the West Indies by the colored plebs. In such cases not a
trace of grace is longer to be found; on the contrary, the movements of the
dances leave nothing to be desired in the line of unequivocal obscenity. It
is this vulgar dance, popularly called tango (after an African word “tangana”),
which sought vainly to gain admission to our salons under the title of “tango
argentino,” by way of Argentina. It was shown to the lower classes of Ar-
gentina last year — the jubilee year of the republic. To the honor of the great
country on the Silver River it may be said at once that there the habanera
is never danced except in the most decent form. It is indubitable, however,
that the Cuban tango was the original product and the danza-habanera its
refined copy prepared for cultured circles, the creoles having borrowed not
only the rhythms but also the choregraphic movements of the dances from
the Africans.
[ 93 ]
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
It can scarcely be set down to the credit of American
and English women that in adopting the tango they are
imitating the example, not of the ladies of Argentina, but
of the women of the Black Republic. Friedenthal says :
The Haytian salon dance, Meringue, is identical with the danza of the
Spanish islands; but there is this difference, that even in the higher circles
of Port-au-Prince, in which decorum and tact prevail and where the young,
light colored women are of fascinating amiability, the gestures of the dance are
never so unobjectionable as is the case with the Spanish creoles; from which
it is to be seen that the dance, consciously or unconsciously, has a different
purpose among these peoples. All the more undisguised is the crude sensuality
among the lower classes of the Haytian population. Here every motion is
obscene; and I am not at all considering the popular merrymakings or dance
festivals secretly held partly in the open, partly in the forests, which are
more like orgies, in which the African savagery, which has outlived centuries,
has unbridled expression.
The rhythmical device under discussion is also found
in the popular music of Hungary, where it is called alia
zoppa (limping). Here it is unquestionably the product
of poetry. Dr. Aurel Wachtel, discussing the music of the
Magyars1 — says that the rhythmical construction of their
ballads is most closely allied to the peculiarity of the Magyar
language, which distinguishes the short and long syl-
lables much more sharply than any other language spoken
by the peoples of Germanic-Slavic-Romanic origin. The
character of the Magyar tongue does not tolerate that
prosodically long syllables in song shall be used as short,
or vice versa.
Now, whether the rhythms of dance-music be derived
from the songs which gave time to the feet of the original
dancers, or the rhythms of poetry were borrowed from
the steps of the dance, it would seem as if the determining
factor was the word. The most primitive music was vocal.
Poetical song had its origin in improvization, and impro-
vization would be clogged unless musical and verbal
rhythm could flow together. The rhythmical snap of the
American negroes is in all likelihood an aboriginal relic,
an idiom which had taken so powerful a hold on them that
they carried it over into their new environment, just as
they did the melodic peculiarities which I have investigated.
It was so powerful an impulse, indeed, that it broke down
1 “Musikalisches Wochenblatt,” July 5, 1878.
[ 94 ]
MINOR VARIATIONS; CHARACTERISTIC RHYTHMS
the barriers interposed by the new language which they
were compelled to adopt in their new home. For the
sake of the snap the creators of the folksongs of the Ameri-
can negroes did not hesitate to distort the metrical structure
of their lines. In scores upon scores of instances trochees
like “Moses,” “Satan,” “mother,” “brother,” “sister,”
and so forth, become iambs, while dactyls become amphi-
brachys, like “No body” “Nobody knows” (see page 96),
“These are my,” “No one can,” etc. A glance into any
one of the collections mentioned will furnish examples by
the score. Of the 527 songs examined, 315 contain the
rhythmical snap which is as well entitled to be called
African as Scottish.
“Another noticeable feature of the songs,” says Theo-
dore F. Seward in his preface to the Fisk Jubilee collection,
“is the rare occurence of triple time, or three-part measure,
among them. The reason for this is doubtless to be
found in the beating of the foot and the swaying of the
body, which are such frequent accompaniments of the
singing. These motions are in even measure and in per-
fect time; and so it will be found that however broken and
seemingly irregular the movement of the music, it is
always capable of the most exact measurement.”
Triple time is, indeed, of extremely rare occurence in the
melodies; taking as a standard the collection to which my
observations have been directed, less than one-tenth of the
tunes are in simple and compound triple time. The regular
swaying of the body to which Mr. Seward refers might
better be described as an effect than as a cause of the even
movement of the music. It is no doubt an inherited pre-
dilection, a survival of a primitive march-rhythm which,
in the nature of the case, lies at the bottom of the first
communal movements of primitive peoples; uneven meas-
ure'is more naturally associated with a revolving movement,
of which I find no mention in the notes of my African
reading. The “shout” of the slaves, as we have seen,
was a march — circular only because that is the only kind
of march which will not carry the dancers away from the
gathering-place. Pantomimic dances, like those which I
[ 95 ]
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
Nobody Knows the Trouble I See
Words and melody from “The Story of the Jubilee Singers with their Songs” by J.B.T. Marsh.
Arrangement by fee Author*
[ 96 ]
MINOR VARIATIONS; CHARACTERISTIC RHYTHMS
witnessed in the Dahoman village at the Columbian Exhi-
bition, in 1 893, are generally martial and consist of advances
and retreats in linear formation with descriptive gestures.
The innate rhythmical capacity of the Africans has
been sufficiently dwelt upon. In the American songs it
finds its expression in the skill with which the negroes
constrain their poetry to accept the rhythms of the music.
Two authors, the Rev. J. Richardson and the Rev. James
Sibree, jr. (the former of whom wrote on the hymnology
of the Malagasy, the latter on their children’s games and
songs), agree (assuming that Wallaschek has quoted them
correctly) in the statement that the poetry of the natives
of Madagascar is not rhythmical, though their music is.
Mr. Allen writes, in his preface to the “Slave Songs”:
“The negroes keep exquisite time in singing, and do not
suffer themselves to be daunted by any obstacle in the
words. The most obstinate scripture phrases or snatches
from hymns they will force to do duty with any tune they
please, and will dash heroically through a trochaic tune
at the head of a column of iambs with wonderful skill.”
A glance into any collection of Afro-American songs will
provide examples of Mr. Allen’s meaning; but if the reader
wishes to see how an irregular line can be made to evolve a
characteristically rhythmic musical phrase he need but look
in “O’er the Crossing” (pages 98-99), at the line “Keep
praying! I do believe.” Despite its rudeness, this song,
because of its vivid imagery, comes pretty near to being
poetry of the genuine type. To learn what word it was
that in the process of oral transmission became corrupted
into “waggin’ ” I have hunted and pondered in vain. Per-
haps “We’re a long time waggin’ at the crossin’ ” was
originally “We’re a long time lagging at the crossing.”
Perhaps the word was once “waggoning.” In the song
“My body rock ’long fever,”1 is a line, “Better true be long
time get over crosses,” which may have reflected a similar
idea, though it is all vague now. In “I’ve been toilin’
at de hill so long” of the Hampton collection there seems
to be another parallel; but the song is very inferior.
1 “Slave Songs,” No. 45.
[ 97 ]
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
O’er the Crossing
[ 98 ]
MINOR VARIATIONS; CHARACTERISTIC RHYTHMS
2. O yonder’s my old mudder,
Been a-waggin* at the hill so long-;
It’s about .time she cross over,
Git home bime-by.
Keep prayin’, I do believe, etc.
3. O hear dat lumberin’ thunder
A-roll from do’ to do’,
A callin’ de people home to God;
Dey’ll git home bime-by.
Little chil’n, I do believe, etc.
4. O see dat forked lightnin’
A-jump from cloud to cloud,
A- pickin’ up God’s chil’n;
Dey’ll git home bime-by.
Pray, mourner, I do believe, etc.
Words and melody from“Slave Songs of the United States”; arranged for the author by
thur Mees.The following note on the song appears in the collection from which it was taken:
“This'infinitely quaint description of the length of the heavenly road’, as CoL Higginson styles
it, is one of the most peculiar and wide-spread of the spirituals. It was sung as given above
in Caroline Co., Virginia, and probably spread southward from this state variously modified
in different localities."
[ 99 ]
CHAPTER VIII
STRUCTURAL FEATURES OF THE
POEMS— FUNERAL MUSIC
Improvization — Solo and Choral Refrain — Examples
from Africa — Strange Funeral Customs — Their
Savage Prototypes — Messages to the Dead-
Graveyard Songs of the American
Slaves
The general structure of the simpler (and therefore
older) American songs shows a stanza containing an al-
ternating solo verse and refrain, with sometimes a chorus.
“The most common arrangement,” say the editors of
“Slave Songs,” in their directions for singing, “gives the
second and fourth lines to the refrain and the first and third
to the verse; and in this case the third line may be a
repetition of the first or may have different words. Often,
however, the refrain occupies only one line, the verse
occupying the other three, while in one or two songs the
verse is only one line, while the refrain is three lines in
length. The refrain is repeated with each stanza; the
words of the verse are changed at the pleasure of the
leader, or fugleman, who sings either well-known words,
or, if he is gifted that way, invents verses as the song goes
on. In addition to the stanza, some of the songs have a
chorus, which usually consists of a fixed set of words,
though in some of the songs the chorus is a good deal
varied. The refrain of the main stanza often appears in
the chorus.”
There is nothing peculiar to these American folksongs
in this recurrent refrain, but it is worth noticing that the
feature in the form of an alternating line of improvization
and a reiterated burden is found throughout Africa. “Their
style is the recitative broken by a full chorus,” says Sir
Richard Burton, speaking of the people of the lake region
[ 100 ]
STRUCTURE OF THE POEMS; FUNERAL MUSIC
of Central Africa. Carl Mauch, in his “Reisen in Siid-
Afrika” says of the music of the Makalaka that it usually
consists of a phrase of eight measures, repeated ad infinitum ,
to which are sung improvized verses with a refrain. Walla-
schek cites Eduard Mohr1 as saying that the Damaras
rarely dance, in fact, only on extraordinary occasions; and
they sing together just as rarely, although fond of solo
singing, the words for which they extemporize, while the
refrains are taken up by a chorus. Wallaschek also says
(page 4), “The Balatpi reminded Weber2 of Venetian gon-
doliers or of the lazzaroni in Naples. One would improvise a
stanza which others would immediately sing in chorus to a
charming melody. Each in turn improvises thus, so that
all have an opportunity of exhibiting their talents for
poetry and wit. The fact that all words ended in a vowel
sound simplified the extemporization of verses, which are
not invariably accurate as regards rhythm. The general
singing of these stanzas seemed to afford the greatest
amusement to the singers as they sat in a circle around
the campfire.” In “Across Africa/’ by Verney Lovett
Cameron, C. B., D. C. L.,3 we read this of the fortune-
telling by a fetich man: “On arrival he seated himself on
the ground, surrounded by his friends, and then commenced
a monotonous recitative. In this he accompanied himself
by shaking a rattle made of basketwork shaped like a
dumbbell, while the circle of attendants joined in a chorus,
sometimes striking their bells and at others laying them
down and clapping their hands in a kind of rhythmic
cadence.”
Speaking of the Zulu-Kafirs, the Rev. Louis Grout says
in Chapter XIV of his book “Zulu-Land; or, Life Among
the Zulu-Kafirs of Natal and Zulu-Land”:4
The most of their songs consist of only a few words, which they repeat
over and over again with such variations as their national taste and habit
or individual fancy may dictate. . . . Their songs often have a special
fitness for the occasion, as when a man in search of a cow goes humming:
1 “Nach den Victoriafallen des Zambesi,” I, 160.
2 Ernst von Weber, “Vier Jahre in Afrika,” I, 221.
3 New York, Harpers, 1877.
4 Philadelphia: The Presbyterian Publication Company, 1864.
[ 101 1
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
“Ma i ze inkomo yetu, si ya yi biza;
Si ti , ma i ze, ma i zeka;
Ma i ze kumi, ma i zeke;
Ma i ze inkomo yetu , si ya yi biza.”
That is:
“Our cow, let her come, we are calling her;
We say, let her come, let her come, so let her come;
Let her come to me, then let her come;
Our cow, let her come, we are calling her.”
Several natives spent a rainy day hard at work digging out and killing
three or four porcupines which had made them trouble in their gardens;
and the next morning one of them passed my door singing the following song,
which I was told he indited for the occasion:
“Truly, oh, truly, they’ll perish anon.
The land of the Zulu so slyly they leave.
All the people, they come, they come,
The land of the Zulu so slyly they leave.
Truly, oh, truly,” etc.
From Denham and Clapperton’s “Narrative of Travels
in Northern and Central Africa,”1 Carl Engel quotes the
following extemporaneous song of negro bards in Bornou
In praise of their Sultan:
Give flesh to the hyenas at daybreak —
Oh, the broad spears!
The spear of the Sultan is the broadest —
Oh, the broad spears!
I behold thee now — I desire to see none other —
Oh, the broad spears!
My horse is as tall as a high wall —
Oh, the broad spears!
He will fight against ten — he fears nothing!
Oh, the broad spears!
He has slain ten; the guns are yet behind —
Oh, the broad spears!
The elephant of the forest brings me what I want —
Oh, the broad spears!
Like unto thee, so is the Sultan —
Oh, the broad spears!
Be brave! Be brave, my friends and kinsmen —
Oh, the broad spears!
God is great! I wax fierce as a beast of prey —
Oh, the broad spears!
God is great! To-day those I wished for are come —
Oh, the broad spears!
It would be an easy matter to multiply parallels of this
song in the matter of form from among the religious songs
of the American negroes. Let two suffice:
I want to be my fader’s chil’en —
Roll, Jordan, roll!
O say, ain’t you done wid de trouble ob de world?
Roll, Jordan, roll!
1 London, 1826, II, 19.
[ 102 ]
STRUCTURE OF THE POEMS; FUNERAL MUSIC
I ask de Lord how long I hold ’em —
Roll, Jordan, roll!
My sins so heavy I can’t get along. Ah!
Roll, Jordan, roll!
I cast my sins in de middle ob de sea —
Roll, Jordan, roll!
Here the second:
Hurry on, my weary soul —
And I yearde from heaven to-day!
My sin is forgiven and my soul set free —
And I yearde from heaven to-day!
A baby born in Bethlehem —
And I yearde from heaven to-day!
De trumpet sound in de odder bright land —
And I yearde from heaven to-day!
My name is called and I must go — -
And I yearde from heaven to-day!
De bell is a-ringin’ in de odder bright world —
And I yearde from heaven to-day!
Relics of ancient ceremonies connected with death and
burial have survived amongst the American negroes and
have been influential in producing some strangely beautiful
and impressive songs. One of these, “Dig My Grave”
(see page 104), from the Bahamas, where the songs, though
they have much community of both poetical and musical
phrase with them, yet show a higher development than
do the slave songs of the States, is peculiarly impressive.
The first period of its melody — it might be called tripartite
— is fairly Schumannesque in breadth and dignity. An-
other, “I Look o’er Yander (see page 105), is not com-
parable with it from a musical point of view, but derives
peculiar interest from the ceremony with which it is
associated. This function is one of those which I call
a relic of ancient ceremonies, because, like the peculiar
idioms of the melodies, it cannot have been copied from
any of the funeral rites which the slaves saw among their
white masters, but does show affinity with Old World
and oldtime ceremonies.
Like the ancient Romans, the slaves were in the habit
of burying their dead at night. Like their savage ancestors
in Africa, they expressed their sorrow in nocturnal song.
It is remotely possible, too, that once they indulged in
funeral dances, even in such wild orgies as travellers have
described. These dances, like most others, have passed
[ 103 ]
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
shine like .a stahr, Good Lawd, I’m boun’ to ’eaVn at rest.
Words and melody from ‘‘Bahama Songs and Stories” ty Charles. L. Edwards, Ph. D., pub-
lished for the American Folk-Lore Society by Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Boston, and reprint-
ed by permission. The arrangement made for this book by H. T. Burleigh.
[ 104 ]
STRUCTURE OF THE POEMS; FUNERAL MUSIC
I Look o’erYander
(Bahama)
An “anthem” which is sung in the Bahamas at a “settirf np”- a sort of all-night watch in and
around the hut of a dying person. Words and melody from “Bahama Songs and Stories”, by
Charles L. Edwards, Phi D., published for the American Folk -Lore .Society by Hough ton, Mif-
flin* Co. and reprinted by permission. The arrangement made for this work by H. T. Burleigh.
[ 105 ]
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
away in communities in which Protestant influences were
dominant, especially where the teachings of the Methodists
and Baptists took strongest hold. There the “shout”
provided vent for the emotions to which their ancestors
gave expression in mad and lascivious dancing.
Paul B. du Chaillu1 describes a nocturnal funeral chant
whose wailing seemed burdened with a sense of absolute
hopelessness and whose words ran thus:
Oh, you will never speak to us any more,
We can not see your face any more,
You will never walk with us again,
You will never settle our palavers for us.
Edwards, in his history of the West Indies,2 says of the
slaves in those islands:
At other times, more especially at the burial of such among them as were
respected in life or venerable through age, they exhibit a sort of Pyrrhick or
war-like dance, in which their bodies are strongly agitated by running, leaping
and jumping, with many violent and frantick gestures and contortions. Their
funeral songs, too, are all of the heroick or martial cast, affording some colour
to the prevalent notion that the negroes consider death not only as a welcome
and happy release from the calamities of their condition, but also as a passport
to the place of their nativity; a deliverance which, while it frees them from
bondage, returns them to the society of their dearest, long lost and lamented
relatives in Africa.
From the description by Francisco Travassos Valdez,3
it appears that in Loanda, Lower Guinea, when a death
occurs the friends of the dead person not only sing and
dance at the funeral, but repeat the rites at intervals of a
week and a month. In the songs the good deeds of the
departed are celebrated and his virtues extolled. The
eulogies are interrupted at intervals by one of the mourners
exclaiming, “He is dead!” whereupon all the others reply
in chorus, “Woe is me!”
In some sections of Africa the period of mourning is, or
was, a period of cessation from musical performances; in
1 The song is quoted by Prof. Edwards from Du Chaillu’s “Explorations
and Adventures in Equatorial Africa,” and Prof. Edwards refers for similar
examples to Major A. G. Laing’s “Travels in Western Africa,” London, 1825,
pp. 233 and 237; Theodor Waitz’s “Anthropologie der Naturvolker,” Leipsic,
I860, II, pp. 240 and 243; and K. Endemann’s “Mittheilungen iiber die
Sotho-Neger,” Berlin, 1874, pp. 57, 63.
2 “The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West
Indies,” by Bryan Edwards, Esq., F. R. S., S. A., Vol. II, p. 103.
3 “Six Years of a Traveller’s Life in Western Africa,” London, 1861, cited
by Engel.
STRUCTURE OF THE POEMS; FUNERAL MUSIC
others death and burial were accompanied by noisy
lamentations.
The Abbe Proyart, in his “History of Loango, Kakongo
and Other Kingdoms of Africa/’1 tells of a custom, when
a native is sick, of summoning, with the physician, a band
of musicians, who assemble around his house and play
on instruments incessantly day and night, presumably till
the patient is recovered or dead. It is not unlikely that in
this custom (which, in a way, suggests the practices of the
shamans of the North American Indians) is to be found
the origin of the singular custom of “settin’ up,” which is
described by Professor Charles L. Edwards in his “Bahama
Songs and Stories.” This nocturnal song-service, which
Jenny Woodville described as a feature of slave life in the
Southern States,2 is held when a negro is supposed to be
dying. “The singers, men, women and children of all
ages,” says Professor Edwards, “sit about on the floor
of the larger room of the hut and stand outside at the
doors and windows, while the invalid lies upon the floor
in the smaller room. Long into the night they sing their
most mournful hymns and ‘anthems,’ and only in the light
of dawn do those who are left as chief mourners silently
disperse.”
The “anthem” which is most often used on these occa-
sions is “I Look o’er Yander.” A notable thing about it
is that it is one of the rare examples of a negro melody
in three-part measure (compound); but there is no sug-
gestion of a lightsome mood on that account in the melody.
“With all the sad intonation accented by the tense emo-
tion of the singers,” says Professor Edwards, “it sounds
in the distance as though it might well be the death tri-
umph of some old African chief:
Each one of the dusky group, as if by intuition, takes some part in the
melody, and the blending of all tone-colors in the soprano, tenor, alto and
bass, without reference to the fixed laws of harmony, makes such peculiarly
touching music as I have never heard elsewhere. As this song of consolation ac-
companies the sighs of the dying one, it seems to be taken up by the mournful
rustle of the palm and to be lost only in the undertone of murmur from the
distant coral reef. It is all weird and intensely sad.
1 In the Pinkert Collection.
2 “Lippincott’s Magazine” for November, 1878.
[ 107 ]
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
Closely related to this custom of “settin’ up” apparently
is one to which Mrs. Jeannette Robinson Murphy called
attention in an interesting article, accompanied by songs
and stories, which she published some years ago in “The
Independent.” In this custom the hymns which are sung
at the deathbed become messages to loved ones gone
before, which the departing soul is charged tobear to heaven.
“When a woman dies,” wrote Mrs. Murphy, “some friend
or relative will kneel down and sing to the soul as it
takes its flight. One of the songs contains endless verses,
conveying remembrances to relatives in glory.” Here,
surely, is a lovely and truly exalted variant of the primitive
custom of placing coins in the mouths of the dead to pay
the Stygian ferryman, or slaughtering dogs, horses and
slaves for a chief’s companionship on the journey into
the next world.
And yet even this affecting ceremony may have had
its origin in the awful practice which prevails in Dahomey,
to which every year a large number of lives are, or used
to be, sacrificed. On the death of a Dahoman king the
“grand custom,” as it is called, is celebrated, at which at
times as many as five hundred captives have been slain
to make up the household of the departed monarch in the
other world. Besides this sacrifice there is an annual one
at which from sixty to eighty are killed and sent as bearers
of messages and news from the new king to his predecessor.
Into the ear of each unfortunate the king whispers the
words which he wishes to have reported, whereupon the
executioner immediately strikes off the ghostly postman’s
mortal head.
Much more singular than this singing to the soul, is a
custom which is said to have prevailed in South Carolina,
where, on the death of the father of a family, his relatives,
assembled around the coffin, ranged in order of age and
relationship, sang the following hymn while marching
around the body:
Dese all my fader’s children.
Outshine de sun!
My fader’s done wid de trouble o’ de world —
Outshine de sun!
[ 108 ]
STRUCTURE OF THE POEMS; FUNERAL MUSIC
The youngest child was then taken and passed first
over, then under the coffin, whereupon two men took it
on their shoulders and carried it to the grave “on the run.”1
Among the songs which Colonel Higginson imprisoned
in his notebook — writing it down, perhaps, in the darkness,
with his hand, as he says, in the covert of his pocket, as
he overheard it from dusky figures moving in “the rhyth-
mical barbaric chant called a ‘shout’ ” beside the campfire,
then carrying it to his tent “like a captured bird or insect”
—was a nocturnal funeral song which surprised him most
because its images were furnished directly by external
nature. “With all my experience of their ideal ways of
speech,” he says, “I was startled when first I came on such
a flower of poetry in the dark soil.”
I know moonlight, I know starlight;
I lay dis body down.
I walk in de moonlight, I walk in de starlight;
I lay dis body down.
I know de graveyard, I know de graveyard,
When I lay dis body down.
I walk in de graveyard, I walk troo de graveyard
To lay dis body down.
I lay in de grave and stretch out my arms;
I lay dis body down.
I go to de judgment in de evenin’ of de day
When I lay dis body down.
An* my soul an’ your soul will meet in de day
When we lay dis body down.
And Colonel Higginson comments: “ ‘I’ll lie in de grave
and stretch out my arms.’ Never, it seems to me, since
man first lived and suffered, was his infinite longing for
peace uttered more plaintively than in that line.” The
phrase of melody which the editors of “Slave Songs” ap-
pended to Colonel Higginson’s words is altogether too
banal to be accepted as the one to which a poem bearing
such a burden of pathos could possibly have been sung.
The music is much more likely to have been something
like that of “O Graveyard” (see page no), which I have
included in my list — the words a variant of “O Moon-
rise,” the tune quite worthy of being described as a flower
of melody floating on dark waters in the shifting shadows
of the moon:
1 “Slave Songs,” page 101.
[ 109 ]
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
O Graveyard!
Andante
Lay dis body down.
3. O my soul! O your soul!
Im walkin’ troo de graveyard;
Lay dis body down.
The arrangement made fdr this work by H.T. Burleigh. Words and melody from "Slave
Songs of the United States” New York, 1867.
f no ]
v
STRUCTURE OF THE POEMS; FUNERAL MUSIC
0 graveyard! O graveyard!
I’m walkin’ troo de graveyard —
Lay dis body down.
It was Mr. Allen’s ingenious surmise that this was the
song which was heard by Mr. W. H. Russell, war corre-
spondent of the London “Times” and which he described
in Chapter XVIII of “My Diary, North and South.”
He is telling of a midnight row from Potaligo to “Mr.
Trewcott’s Estate” on Barnwell Island:
The oarsmen, as they bent to their task, beguiled the way by singing in
unison a real negro melody, which was as unlike the works of the Ethiopian
Serenaders as anything in song could be unlike another. It was a barbaric
sort of madrigal, in which one singer beginning was followed by the others
in unison, repeating the refrain in chorus, and full of quaint expression and
melancholy:
Oh, your soul! Oh, my soul!
I’m going to the churchyard
To lay this body down;
Oh, my soul! Oh, your soul!
We’re going to the churchyard
To lay this nigger down.
And then some appeal to the difficulty of passing the “Jawdan” constituted
the whole of the song, which continued with unabated energy during the
whole of the little voyage. To me it was a strange scene. The stream, dark
as Lethe, flowing between the silent, houseless, rugged banks, lighted up near
the landing by the fire in the woods, which reddened the sky — the wild strain
and the unearthly adjurations to the singer’s souls as though they were pal-
pable, put me in mind of the fancied voyage across the Styx.
f m ]
CHAPTER IX
DANCES OF THE AMERICAN
NEGROES
Creole Music — The Effect of Spanish Influences —
Obscenity of Native African Dances — Relics in
the Antilles — The Habanera — Dance-Tunes
from Martinique
The world over there is a most intimate relationship
between folksong and folkdance. Poetical forms and
rhythms are the effects as well as the causes of the re-
gulated movements and posings of the dance. Peoples,
like those of Africa, who have a highly developed sense
of rhythm also have a passionate fondness for the dance,
and it was to have been expected that the black slaves
would not only develop them in their new environment,
but also preserve the rhythms of those primitive dances
in the folksongs which they created here. This was the
case, in a measure, but the influence which was most potent
in the development of the characteristic folksong was
prejudicial to the dance.
The dances which were part and parcel of the primitive
superstitions which the slaves brought with them from
Africa necessarily fell under the ban of the Christian
Church, especially of its Protestant branch. In Louisiana,
the Antilles and Spanish America the Roman Catholic
Church exercised a restrictive and reformative influence
upon the dance; in other parts of the continent the Metho-
dist and Baptist denominations, whose systems were most
appealing to the emotional nature of the blacks, rooted
it out altogether, or compelled the primitive impulse to
find expression in the “shout” — just as the same influences
led the white population to substitute the song-games,
which are now confined to children, for the dance in many
sections of the United States.
f U2 ]
DANCES OF THE AMERICAN NEGROES
Practically all of the dances described by African travel-
lers were orgies in which the dramatic motif, when not
martial, was lascivious. Dr. Holub, in his “Seven Years
in South Africa,”1 says that the Mabunda dance is of
so objectionable a character that the negroes refuse to
dance it, except in masks. In “From Benguela to the
Territory of Yucca,” by H. Capello and R. Ivens, of the
Royal Portuguese Navy,2 the authors say of the native
dances: “As a rule, these are of the grossest kind, which
the women, more particularly, try to make as obscene as
possible; without grace, without cachet, but simply in-
decent and fitted only to inflame the passions of the
lowest of our sex. After three or four pirouttes before
the spectators, the male dancer butts his stomach violently
against the nearest female, who, in turn, repeats the
action, and thus brings the degrading spectacle to an end.”
Dr. Georg Schweinfurth, in his “Heart of Africa,”3 describ-
ing an orgy of the Bongo, says: “The license of their
revelry is of so gross a character that the representations
of one of my interpreters must needs be suppressed. It
made a common market-woman droop her eyes, and called
up a blush even to the poor sapper’s cheeks.” In “Across
Africa,” by Verney Lovett Cameron, C. B., D. C. L., com-
mander in the Royal Navy,4 the author writes: “Dancing
in Manyuema” — a cannibal country — “is a prerogative of
the chiefs. When they feel inclined for a terpsichorean per-
formance they single out a good-looking woman from the
crowd, and the two go through much wriggling and curious
gesticulation opposite each other. The village drums are
brought out and vigorously beaten, the drummers mean-
while shouting ‘Gamello! Gamellol’ If the woman is
unmarried the fact of a chief asking her to dance is equi-
valent to an offer of marriage, and many complications
often occur in consequence.”
There was none of this bestiality on exhibition in the
dances of the Dahomans, which I saw at the World’s
1 London, 1881.
2 London, 1882.
3 Vol. I, page 355.
4 New York: Harper’s, 1887.
f 113 1
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
Fair in Chicago in 1893, for reasons which can easily be
imagined; such spectacles as the travellers describe would
not be tolerated in a civilized community anywhere in the
world at the present time, though the equally frank
danse du ventre , which the Latin satirists scourged cen-
turies ago, was to be seen in the Midway Plaisance
under circumstances which seemed to have been accepted
as a palliative, just as the “tango” and the “turkey-trot,”
the former African in name and both African in dramatic
motif and purpose, are tolerated in circles which call
themselves polite to-day. The dances of the Dahomans
were war dances. These people have been in constant
contact with white traders for more than a hundred years,
but they probably take the same “delight in singing,
dancing and cutting off heads” now that they did when
Forbes visited them three-quarters of a century ago.
Indeed, a bit of pantomimic action, which I saw repeated
several times at the fair, testified, in a way almost too
vivid to be amusing, to the love of decapitation which has
been so much commented on by travellers.
A dozen or more names of dances, all of vague meaning
and etymology, have come down to us in the books of men
who have written about the negroes in the Western Hemi-
sphere, and so far as can be learned all these dances were
more or less wild and lascivious. Lascivious they have
remained, even in the forms which they have assumed
under the influence of French and Spanish culture. There
is no doubt in the mind of Friedenthal, whose observations
were wide and whose descriptions are sympathetic, that
the rhythmical foundation of the fascinating Habanera
is a negro product upon which graceful melodies were
imposed. “We shall make no error,” he writes,1 in assum-
ing that the Habanera, as its name already indicates,
originated in Havana. Thence it conquered all of Spanish
and Portugese America (i. e ., Brazil), and also the European
settlements in the West Indies, Central and South America.
But it is to be particularly observed that only the real
Habanera, the dance with simple rhythms, penetrated
1 Op. cit., pp. 115-116.
[ 114 ]
DANCES OF THE AMERICAN NEGROES
to these lands. Extended and complicated rhythms are
known only where the negroes are to be found outside
of the West Indies, in Brazil and on the coasts of Venezuela,
Colombia, Central America and Mexico. In other
countries, as, for instance, the interior of Mexico, the
Plata states and Chili, where there are no negroes, ex-
tended and complicated rhythms are entirely unknown.”
Commenting in another place1 on the influences which
created the dances of the American creoles, he says:
Not much less can have been the share, on the other hand, which the
Spaniards and creoles took in the dances of the blacks. Every day in their
hours of rest they had opportunities to see the partly sensual, partly grotesque
and wild dances of their black slaves, and to hear their peculiar songs. What
impressions may not these fascinating, complicated and bizarre and yet trans-
parent rhythms of the negroes have made upon the Spaniards who themselves
possess a refined sense of rhythm. Added to this the strange instruments
of percussion which, while marking the rhythm, exerted an almost uncanny
effect.
Here, then, two races confronted each other, both highly musical but
reared in different musical worlds. No wonder that the Spaniards also bene-
fited from and promptly took up these remarkable rhythms into their own
music. Of all these rhythms, however, the simplest which can be heard from
all negroes is this:
JOT
which, we have already learned, is the rhythm of the Habanera. The melody
of the Habanera, which we would derive from Middle or Southern Spain, and
the rhythm which accompanies it and had its origin in Africa, therefore re-
present, in a way, the union of Spanish spirit with African technique. We
thus get acquainted with a hybrid art in the Habanera, or Danza, but as
must at once be said here, the only hybrid art-form of creole music.
The Habanera, as a dance, is not vocal, but its form has
been used most charmingly in vocal music, and in two
of its manifestations, Carmen’s air in the first scene of
Bizet’s opera and the Mexican song “Paloma,”
it is universally familiar. I have found a few Afro-Ameri-
can songs in which the characteristic rhythm is so persist-
ently used as to suggest that they were influenced by a
subconscious memory of the old dance; but the evidence
1 Page 95.
I 115 ]
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
is not sufficient to authorize such a statement as a scientific
fact. I make room for one, “Tant sirop est doux,” an
erotic song from Martinique, which M. Tiersot says is
widely known among French colonies inhabited by the
blacks.
The origin of the Habanera is perpetuated in its name,
and in this respect it stands alone. Other dances of which
writers on the Antilles have made mention are the Bam-
boula, Bouene, Counjai(or Counjaille), Calinda (orCalien-
da, possibly from the Spanish Que linda ), Bele (from the
French bel air), Benguine, Babouille, Cata (or Chata) and
Guiouba. The last word seems preserved in the term“juba,”
which is now applied to the patting accompaniments of
negro dance-songs made familiar by the old minstrel shows.
The word Congo, as applied to a negro dance which is
still remembered in Louisiana, is, I fancy, a generic term
there, though it is also used in French Guiana for a dance
called Chica in Santo Domingo and the Windward
Islands. The Bamboula is supposed to have been so called
after the drum of bamboo, which provided its musical
stimulus. An African word seems to lie at the bottom of
the term Counjai. Long years ago Lafcadio Hearn wrote
me from New Orleans: “My quadroon neighbor, Mamzelle
Eglantine, tells me that the word Koundjo (in the West
Indies Candio or Candjo) refers to an old African dance
which used to be danced with drums.” Perhaps some such
meaning is preserved in the Song “Criole Candjo.” (See
page 1 1 8.)
The etymology of the other terms baffles me, but it is
of no consequence in this study; the dances were all alike
in respect of the savage vigor and licentiousness which
marked their performance. “The Calinda,” say the
editors of “Slave Songs of the United States,” “was a sort
of contradance which has now passed entirely out of use.”
Bescherelles describes the two lines as “avan^ant et reculant
en cadence et faisant des contortions fort singulieres et des
gestes fort lascifs .” It is likely that the Calinda disappeared
from Louisiana as a consequence of the prohibition of the
dances in the Place Congo in New Orleans, about 1843;
[ 116]
DANCES OF THE AMERICAN NEGROES
Tant sirop est doux
A Martinique Song. Words and Melody collected by Lafcadio Hearn. Arrangement by the
Author.
[ 117 1
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
Criole Candjo
[ 118 ]
DANCES OF THE AMERICAN NEGROES
[ H9 ]
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
2.
Mocourri dans youn bois voisin,
Mais Criole la prend meme ci min,
Et tous tans li m’ape dire,
“Vini, zamie, pou’ nous rire.”
“Non, Miche, m’pas oule rire moin,
Non, Miche, m’pas oule rire.”
3.
Mais li te tant cicane moi,
Pou li te quitte moin youn fois
Mo te ’blize pou’ li dire,
“Oui, Miche, mo oule rire.
Oui, Miche, mo oule rire moin,
Oui, Miche, mo oule rire.”
4.
Zaut tous qu’ap’es rire moin la-bas
Si zaut te conne Candjo la,
Qui belle fafon li pou’ rire,
Dje pini moin! zaut s’re dire,
“Oui, Miche, mo oule rire moin,
Oui, Miche, mo oule rire.”
2.
(I go teck walk in wood close by,
But Creole teck same road and try
All time all time to meek free —
“Swithawt, meek merrie wid me.”
“Naw, sah, I dawn’t want meek merrie, me,
Naw, sah, I dawn’t want meek merrie.”
3.
But him slide ’round an ’round dis chile,
Tell, jis fo’ sheck ’im off lill while
Me, I was bleedze fo’ say: “Shoo!
If I’ll meek merrie wid you?
O, yass, I ziss leave meek merrie, me,
Yass, sah, I ziss leave meek merrie.”
4.
You-alls wat laugh at me so well,
I wish you’d knowed dat Creole swell,
Wid all ’is swit, smilin’ trick.
’Pon my soul! you’d done say, quick,
“O, yass, I ziss leave meek merrie, me.
Yass, sah, I ziss leave meek merrie.”)
The melody as written down by Mr. W. Macrum of Pittsburgh; English
paraphrase by George W. Cable, used by his permission and that of The Cen-
tury Company. A note to the author from Lafcadio Hearn (who, at that
time, was a resident of New Orleans), says: “My quadroon neighbor, Mam-
zelle Eglantine, tells me that the word koundjo (in the West Indies Candio
or Candjo ) refers to an old African dance which used to be danced with drums.
The ‘Criole Candjo’ is, therefore, a sort of nigger creole dandy who charms and
cajoles women by his dancing — what the French would call un beau valseur .”
[ 120 ]
DANCES OF THE AMERICAN NEGROES
but it and other dances of its character have remained in
existence in the West Indies. Hearn says,1 “Two old African
dances, the Caleinda and the Bele (which later is accom-
panied by chanted improvization) are danced on Sundays
to the sound of the drum on almost every plantation in
the island” (Martinique). As Hearn saw the Calinda
it was danced by men only, all stripped to the waist and
twirling heavy sticks in a mock fight. “Sometimes,” he
adds, “especially at the great village gatherings, when the
blood becomes overheated by tafia, the mock fight may be-
come a real one, and then even cutlasses are brought
into play.” The surmise lies near that the Calinda may
originally have been a war dance. Its name and measures
survive in some creole songs, one of which will occupy my
attention when the use of song for satirical purposes is
reached.
TheCounjai (“Caroline,” p. 139) evidently cameunderthe
personal observation of the lady who collected some secular
creole songs in St. Charles Parish, La., which found their
way into “Slave Songs of the United States.” They were
sung, she says, “to a simple sort of dance, a sort of minuet.”
But they are in duple time, while the minuet is in triple
measure. The songs have a refrain, which is sung by the
chorus, and solo verses which are improvized by a leader
distinguished by his voice and poetical skill, who, in them,
compliments a dusky beauty or lauds a plantation hero.
The dancers do not sing, and the accompaniment seems
to be purely instrumental — a mere beating on a drum made
of a flour barrel and a rasping on the jawbone of an animal
with a key. This singular instrument has a prototype in
Africa in the shape of a notched board, which is rubbed
with a stick. Livingstone describes what he calls a “cas-
suto,” a “hollow piece of wood about a yard long, covered
with a board cut like a ladder. Running a stick along it
gives a sound within which passes for a tenor.” The de-
scription is Wallaschek’s; the Chinese have a temple instru-
ment embodying the same principle — a wooden tiger with
a serrated spine. Hearn mentions primitive drums as used
1 “Two Years,” etc., p. 143.
[ 121 ]
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
Aurore Pradere
[ 122 ]
DANCES OF THE AMERICAN NEGROES
2. Aurore Pradbre, belle ’ti fille,(7er.)
C’est li mo oule, c’est li ma pren.
Li pas mande robe moussiline,
Li pas mande deba brode,
Li pas mande soulier prinelle,
C’est li mo oule, c’est li ma pren.
Aurore Pradere, pretty maid t(ter.)
She’s just what I want and her i’ll have-
A muslin g-own she does n’t choose,
She does n’t ask for broidered hose,
She does n’t want prunella shoes;
O she’s what I want and her i'll have.
The melody In the rhythm of a Coonjai. Melody and words of the second stanza from"Slave
Songs of the United States,” having been collected on the Good Hope plantation in St. Charles
Parish in Louisiana. The arrangement was made by the author for George W. Cable’s essay
entitled “The Dance in the Place Congo’,’ which appeared in the Century Magazine for Febru-
ary, 1836. Reprinted by permission of Mr. Cable and the Century Co.
I 123 ]
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
Remon, Remon
A Coonjai. "I spoke to Remon, he spoke to Simon, he spoke toTitine, who was stricken with
grief. O, woman Romulus, beautiful woman Romulus, you have done tome what you wished”
Words and melody from "Slave Songs of the United States’.’ The arrangement by John Van
Broekhoven, printed in the Century Magazine in George W. Cable’s essay“The Dance in Place
Congo’,’ is here reprinted by permission of Mr Cable and the Century Co.
[ 124 J
DANCES OF THE AMERICAN NEGROES
in New Orleans in a letter to me dated January, 1885 : “Yes*
I have seen them dance, but they danced the Congo, and
sang a purely African song to the accompaniment of a
drygoods box beaten with a stick or bones and a drum
made by stretching a skin over a flour barrel. As for the
dance — in which the women do not take their feet off the
ground — it is as lascivious as is possible. The men dance
very differently, like savages leaping in the air.”
To Mr. Hearn I owe several examples of Martinique
folk-music, which were written down for him by a band-
master in St. Pierre. (Page 126.) A fascinating combi-
nation of African and Spanish elements is found in the
melody, which the collector called “Manmam Colette” —
unquestionably a dance-song. On the bandmaster’s
transcription he had written directions that the first part
(allegretto) be sung eight times; then comes the dance
(allegro) ten times. The same directions probably applied
also to “Ou beau di moin tete ou bien pomadee.” The
second part of the tune, to which the bandmaster gave
the title “Dessan mouillage acheter daubanes,” has a
curious resemblance to a Tyrolean “yodel.” It is probably
the melody to which a ballad to which Hearn makes refer-
ence is sung:
Moin descenne Saint-Pie,
Achete dobannes;
Aulie ces dobannes
C’est yon bel bois menmoin monte.
The spelling of the soft and musical creole patois is a
matter of individual case, taste and fancy. The ballad
tells the story of a youth of Fort de France who was sent
to St. Pierre to buy a stock of earthenware water-jars
(1 dobannes ), but who fell in love with a colored girl and spent
his father’s money in buying her presents and a wedding
outfit. Hearn cites the song to illustrate a pretty simile.
The phrase “bel bois” is used to designate handsome people.
“Toutt bel bois ka alle,” said Manm-Robert, meaning that
all the handsome people are passing away. “This is the
very comparison made by Ulysses looking upon Nausicaa,
though more naively expressed,” comments our author.
[ 125 j
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
Three Dance-tunes from Martinique
N? 1. Manmam Colette
Allegretto
N9 3. Dessan mouillage acheter daub an es
Transcribed by a Bandmaster at St Pierre and sent to the author by Lafcadio Hearn
[ 126 ]
CHAPTER X
SONGS OF THE BLACK CREOLES
The Language of the Afro-American Folksongs—
Phonetic Changes in English — Grammar of the
Creole Patois — Making French Compact
and Musical — Dr. Mercier’s Pamphlet —
Creole Love-Songs
The circumstance that the folksongs of the slaves were
preserved by oral tradition alone until nearly fifty years
ago, when the first collection was printed, gives peculiar
interest to a study of their language — or rather their
languages, for the songs of the black creoles of Louisiana
and the Antilles are also American folksongs, though they
are sung in French patois and not in English. In both
cases a fundamental phenomenon confronts us: The
slave had to make the language in which he communicated
with his master, or rather he had to reconstruct it orally
without the help of written or printed books. Having
made his patois, he forgot his own native tongue and per-
petuated the new medium of communication in the same
way in which he had learned and perpetuated the African
language. After this had been done and the new tongue
had become to him a vehicle for his rude artistic utter-
ances, those utterances had to be retained by tradition
and transmitted by word of mouth entirely. This brought
with it a phenomenon with which students of ballads are
familiar — the corruptions of texts due to the habit of accept-
ing sound for sense. The slaves of the States in which the
masters spoke English, under Protestant influences, heard
the Biblical expressions which appealed powerfully to their
imagination and emotions from their preachers, some of
whom were as illiterate as the multitude they sought to
enlighten. They heard their masters use many words of
which they could only surmise the meaning, but which also
appealed to them as resounding and mouth-filling. Like
[ 127]
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
children they accepted the sounds without inquiring into
the sense, or gave them meanings of their own. Such
terms as “iggle-quarter,” “count-aquils” and “ginny-bank”
in the working song “Ho, round the corn, Sally,” may be
corruptions of French words heard from the Huguenot
refugees. (Unless, indeed, “iggle-quarter” be eagle-quarter,
“ginny-bank,” the Bank of Virginia, and the lines have
a financial sense.) Others have a more or less obvious inter-
pretation. “Oh, my body rock ’long fever” may have
well been carried away from a sickroom as the remark
of master or mistress: “My body has long been racked
by a fever.” “Body racked wid pain” is a line in one of
the songs which I have printed — “O’er the Crossing.” I
cannot accept the interpretation of “Daniel rock de lion
joy” as “Daniel racked the lion’s jaw,” given in a footnote
of “Slave Songs”; “locked the lion’s jaw” is too obviously
the correct reading. “An’ de nineteen wile in his han”’
is pretty plainly indicated as once having read: “The anoint-
ing oil in his hand” by the context, and “John sittin’ on
de golden order” was probably “John sitting on the golden
altar” — a picture which could not fail to appeal to the
fancy of the negroes, though I do not know where they
found it.
The survival of words from African languages seems
much smaller in the songs than in the folktales from Ba-
hama which Professor Edwards prints in his book.1 As I
have intimated, these words would naturally be retained
in songs connected with superstitious ceremonies and
forbidden dances.
In his preface to “Slave Songs” Mr. Allen points out
that “phonetic” decay had gone very far in the speech of
the slaves, and with it “an extreme simplification of ety-
mology and syntax.” Th and v or f had been softened
into d and b; v and w had been interchanged; words had
been shorn of syllables which seemed redundant — as illus-
trated in “lee’ bro’ ” for “little brother.” The letters n , v
and r were sometimes used euphonically, perhaps to grat-
ify a melodic sense, as the vowel a frequently was for
1 “Bahama Songs and Stories.”
[ 128 ]
SONGS OF THE BLACK CREOLES
rhythmical effect. Mr. Allen gives an example of the
euphonic n : “He de baddes’ little gal from yere to ti’Europe” ;
the interjection of a, as in “settin’ side-a ob de holy Lamb,”
is very common.
There were contractions which scarcely call for comment,
in view of what still happens every day among cultured
white people in colloquial speech. The progress of “How
do you do?” through “How d’ye do?” and “How dy’?”
to “Huddy” is very patent, and we can scarcely deplore
it in view of the singularly mellifluous and brisk line “Tell
my Jesus huddy O.” The grammatical simplifications were
natural enoughin a people who hadtospeak alanguagewhich
they were not permitted to learn to read or write. Em was a
pronoun which applied to all genders and both numbers;
been and done as the past tenses of verbs are familiar
to-day among other than the blacks in the South, as are
many other peculiarities of grammar of which we cannot
say whether the slaves borrowed them from the illiterate
whites or the whites from them.
It is perhaps a little singular, though not impossible
of explanation, that the negroes who came under the
domination of the French colonists of Louisiana and the
West Indies should have developed a patois or dialect,
which is not only more euphonious than the language from
which it was derived, but also have created a system of
grammar which reflects credit upon their logical capacity
and their musical instincts. The peculiarities of the
English songs referred to are nearly all extinct, but the
creole patois, though never reduced to writing for its users,
is still a living language. It is the medium of communica-
tion between black nurses and their charges in the French
families of Louisiana to-day, and half a century ago it
was exclusively spoken by French creoles up to the age of
ten or twelve years. In fact, children had to be weaned
from it with bribes or punishment. It was, besides, the
language which the slave spoke to his master and the
master to him. The need which created it was the same as
that which created the corrupt English of the slaves in
other parts of the country. The Africans who were brought
[ 129 ]
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
to America had no written language. Among them there
was diversity of speech as well as of tribes and customs.
The need of a medium of communication between them and
their masters was greater than that of a communal lan-
guage for themselves; and in its construction they had the
help of their masters, who were not averse to a simplifica-
tion of their colloquial speech. The African languages were
soon forgotten. Dr. Alfred Mercier, who wrote a de-
lightful brochure on the grammar of the creole patois
some forty or more years ago,1 says that there were then
not more than six or seven African words in the language
spoken by the creoles. His meaning, no doubt, was that
only so many words were employed colloquially, for a
great many more were in use in the incantations which
formed a part of their superstitious rites and in some of
the songs which accompanied their orgiastic dances,
though their meaning was forgotten. How the black
slave proceeded in the construction of a grammar for the
speech which he took from the lips of his master is most
interestingly described by Dr. Mercier in his pamphlet,
on which I have drawn for the following notes :
In the first place, the negro composes the verb. For
his present indicative he takes a pronoun and the adjective
which qualifies a state of being. He says Mo contan (Je
suis content) for “Moi etre content”; he suppresses the
infinitive (etre). The present indicative tells us that the
action expressed by the verb is doing. You present your-
self at the door of a house and say to the negress who opens
to your knock that you want to speak to her master. She
replies that he dines (qu’il dine); i. e., he is dining (qu’il
est dinant); to form the present participle she makes use
of the pronoun lui (which she pronounces li) and places
it before the preposition apres {ape). Of these two words
she makes one, lape , to which she adds the infinitive diner —
lape dinin — (il est apres diner).
The preposition apres plays an important role in the
creole patois. Dr. Mercier points out that it is used by the
1 “Etude sur la Langue Creole en Louisiane,” evidently printed for private
circulation, and bearing neither imprint nor date.
[ 130 ]
SONGS OF THE BLACK CREOLES
negroes in the same sense in which it was employed long
ago in France: etre apres fair e quelque chose , to be after
doing something — a locution found in Languedoc.1 The
creole negro takes the word indicating a state of being and
prefixes the pronoun:
Ye — Us sont — They are
To express an act in the course of accomplishment re-
course is had to the pronoun joined to the preposition
apres {ape) which is followed by the infinitive: Moi
apres, i. e ., Mo ape , which is contracted into mape, and so
on with the rest:
Nothing remains of the pronoun, except the sound of
the initial letter, and these people having no written
language, even the letter does not exist for them. When
the black slave heard his master speak of things in the past
tense it was the sound te which fell most frequently and
persistently into his ear: J’etais, tu etais, il etait, ils
etaient. Upon this te the negro seized as representing
or figuring the past, and joining it to the pronoun he
formed his imperfect indicative of the verb etre:
Mote — J’etais.
Tote — Tu etais.
Lite — II etait.
Noute — Nous etions.
Voute — Vous etiez.
Yete — Ils etaient.
Mo — Je suis — I am
To — Tu es — Thou art
Li — II est — He is
Nou — Nous sommes — We are
Vou — Vous etes — You are
malade — ill.
malades — ill.
Mape
Tape
Vape
Yape
the equivalent of
Je suis
Tu es
II est
apres diner.
Nous sommes
Vous etes
Ils sont
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
The negro hears some one say to the white man who is
expecting an arrival, “II va venir.” He recognizes that
“va” as the sign of the future. For “Ce gros bateau a
vapeur ne pourra pas descendre quand l’eau sera basse”
he says : Gro stimbotte-la pas capab decende can lo va basse . To
“va” he attached the infinitive of the verb to determine the
kind of action, and the pronoun to indicate the actor.
Thus va chante tells us that there is to be singing. Who is
to sing? The pronoun gives the information:
Mo
To
Li
Nou
Vou
Ye
va chante.
This is the primitive stage of the process which in the
mouth of the future creole undergoes two changes: The
sound va is combined with the pronoun ( mova , tova , liva,
nouva, vouva , yeva — chante ), and then for economical con-
traction the sounds ov, iv, ouv, ev are elided, the initial
letter of the pronoun is united with the radical sound a ,
and we have:
Ma
Ta
La
Na
Va
Ya
chante.
Sometimes there is a still further contraction, the pro-
nominal consonant disappearing, leaving the vowel a alone
to represent the future. For the imperative mood the creole
uses the infinitive, preceded by the noun or pronoun; for
“Que Jules vienne avec vous” he says: Jule vini ave vou.
The first person plural in the creole imperative is curious
in that to form it he calls in the help of the imperative
verb “aller,” which he pronounces anon; “Traversons cette
rue” becomes anon traverse larue cila. He escapes such
embarrassments as “buvons,” “dormons,” “cousons” with
the help of his ever-ready anon — anon boi , anon dormi ,
anon coude.
“In its transformation into creole,” says Dr. Mercier,
“French is simplified and acquires either grace or strength.
[ 132 ]
SONGS OF THE BLACK CREOLES
In many cases the verbs ‘to be’ ( etre ) and ‘to have’ {avoir)
disappear: Li vaillan (il est vaillant); Li pas peur (il
n’a pas peur). In French the negative particles are over-
abundant; it is one of the faults of the language. In the
phrase ‘Il n’a pas peur’ there are two negatives, ‘ne’ and
‘pas.’ The creole uses only one and says in three words
what the speaker of French says in five. The difference
is still more apparent in the phrases “Je commence a etre
fatigue; je crois qu’il est temps de nous en retourner”—
fourteen words; Mo comance lasse; mo ere tan non tournin
— eight. Moreover, fleetness is acquired by the suppression
of the preposition ‘a’ and the conjunction ‘que.’ ”
Obeying the law of laziness, or following the line of
least resistance, the creole elides the letters which are
difficult of pronunciation, or substitutes easy ones for
them. The letter r is as difficult for the negro as it is for
the Chinaman; he elides it and says pou for pour, ape
for apres, di for dire, cate for quatre. In Martinique, if I
am to judge by my songs, when he does not dispense with
the letter altogether he gives it a soft sound, like an in-
fusion of w into ou : ouoche for roche. The French sound
of u is as difficult for the negro as' it is for the Ameri-
can or Englishman; he does not struggle with it, but sub-
stitutes the short sound of i: torti for tortue, jige for juge,
or he uses the continental sound (oo) : la nouite for la nuit,
ton souite for tout de suite. Eu he changes to ai, as in air;
lonair for Thonneur;/ and g giving him trouble, he changes
them to z: touzou for toujours, zamais for jamais, manze
for mange. He has no use for the first person pronoun
“je,” mo sufficing him; and “tu” he replaces with to and
toi. Words which are too long to suit his convenience he
abbreviates at pleasure: bar ace, embarrasse; pele , appele;
blie , oublie.
Thus, then, grew the pretty language, soft in the mouth
of the creole as bella lingua in bocca toscana , in which the
creole sang of his love, gave rhythmical impulse to the
dance, or scourged with satire those who fell under his
displeasure — the uses to which the music was put which I
purpose now to discuss. It should be borne in mind that
[ 133 1
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
the popular notion in the United States that a creole is a
Louisiana negro is erroneous. Friedenthal discusses the
origin of the word and its application in the introduction
to his book “Musik, Tanz und Dichtung bei den Kreolen
Amerikas.” The Spanish word criollo , from which the
French creole is derived, is a derivation from the verb
criar, to create, bring up, breed. From this root other
words are derived; not only substantives like cria (brood),
crianza (education, bringing up), criatura> criador, etc., but
also criada (servant), which in other languages has a
very different etymology ( Diener , serviteur , domestique ,
servo , etc.). The term criado is a relic of the old patriarchal
system, under which the servants of the household were
brought up by the family. Children of the servants became
servants of the children of the master. So on the plan-
tations of the Southern States slaves were set apart from
childhood to be the playmates and attendants of the
children of the family. Criollo also signifies things bred
at home but born in foreign lands, and thus it came about
that the Spaniard called his children born in foreign lands
criollos; and as these foreign lands were chiefly the American
colonies, the term came to be applied first to the white
inhabitants of the French and Spanish colonies in America
and only secondarily to the offspring of mixed marriages,
regardless of their comparative whiteness or blackness.
When Lafcadio Hearn was looking up creole music for
me in New Orleans in the early 8o’s of the last century, he
wrote in one of his letters: “The creole songs which I have
heard sung in the city are Frenchy in construction, but
possess a few African characteristics of method. The
darker the singer the more marked the oddities of into-
nation. Unfortunately, most of those I have heard were
quadroons or mulattoes.” In another letter he wrote:
“There could neither have been creole patois nor creole
melodies but for the French and Spanish blooded slaves
of Louisiana and the Antilles. The melancholy, quavering
beauty and weirdness of the negro chant are lightened by
the French influence, or subdued and deepened by the
Spanish.” Hearn was musically illiterate, but his powers
[ 134 ]
SONGS OF THE BLACK CREOLES
of observation were keen and his intuitions quick and
penetrating. He felt what I have described as the imposi-
tion of French and Spanish melody on African rhythm.
This union of elements is found blended with the French
patois in the songs created by the creole negroes in Louisiana
and the West Indies. Hearn came across an echo of the
most famous of all creole love-songs in St. Pierre and in his
fantastic manner gave it a habitation and a name. De-
scribing the plague of smallpox in a chapter of “Two Years
in the French West Indies,” he tells of hearing a song com-
ing up through the night, sung by a voice which had “that
peculiar metallic timbre that reveals the young negress.”
Always it is one “melancholy chant”:
Pauv* ti Lele,
Pauv* ti Lele!
Li gagnin doule, doule, doule,-—
Le gagnin doule
Tout patout!
I want to know who little Lele was, and why she had pains “all over” —
for however artless and childish these creole songs seem, they are invariably
originated by some real incident. And at last somebody tells me that “poor
little Lele had the reputation of being the most unlucky girl in St. Pierre;
whatever she tried to do resulted only in misfortune; — when it was morning
she wished it were evening, that she might sleep and forget; but when the
night came she could not sleep for thinking of the trouble she had had during
the day, so that she wished it were morning. ...”
Perhaps “Pov’ piti Lolotte” (a portion of whose melody
served Gottschalk, a New Orleans creole of pure blood, for
one of his pianoforte pieces) came from the West Indies
originally, but it is known throughout Creoleland now. It
fell under the notice of Alphonse Daudet, who,Tiersot says,
put it in the mouth of one of his characters in a novel. Out
of several versions which I have collected I have put the
song together, words and melody, in the form in which
Mr. Burleigh has arranged it. (See page 136.) It is worth
noting that the coda of the melody was found only in the
transcript made from the singing of the slaves on the
Good Hope plantation, in St. Charles Parish, La., and
that this coda presents a striking use of the rhythmical
snap which I have discussed in connection with the “spirit-
uals,” but which is not found in any one of them with so
much emotional effect as here. In his essay in “The Cen-
[ 135 ]
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
Pov’ piti Lolotte
Andante cantabile
t 136 ]
SONGS OF THE BLACK CREOLES
Words and melody collated from various sources by the author. The arrangement made by
H.T. Burleigh.
[ 137 ]
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
tury Magazine” on creole songs Mr. Cable wrote:
One of the best of these creole love-songs ... is the tender lament
of one who sees the girl of his heart’s choice the victim of chagrin in beholding
a female rival wearing those vestments of extra quality that could only be
the favors which both women had courted from the hand of some proud
master whence alone such favors should come. “Calalou,” says the song,
“has an embroidered petticoat, and Lolotte, or Zizi,” as it is often sung, “has
a heartache.” Calalou, here, I take to be a derisive nickname. Originally
it is the term for a West Indian dish, a noted ragout. It must be intended
to apply here to the quadroon women who swarmed into New Orleans in
1809 as refugees from Cuba, Guadaloupe and other islands where the war
against Napoleon exposed them to Spanish and British aggression. It was
with this great influx of persons, neither savage nor enlightened, neither
white nor black, neither slave nor truly free, that the famous quadroon caste
arose and flourished.. If Calalou, in. the verse, was one of these quadroon
fair ones, the song is its own explanation.
In its way the song “Caroline” (see page 139) lets light
into the tragedy as well as the romance of the domestic
life of the young creole slaves. Marriage, the summit of
a poor girl’s ambition, is its subject — that state of blissful
respectability denied to the multitude either by law or
social conditions. I have taken words and melody from
“Slave Songs,” but M. Tiersot, who wrote the song down
from the singing of a negress in New Orleans, gives the
name of the heroine as Azelie and divides the poem into
two stanzas separated by a refrain:
Papa dit non, maman dit non,
C’est li m’oule, c’est li ma pren. (Bis)
Un, deux, trois, Azelie.
Pas pare com ga, ma cher! (Bis)
Sam’di l’amour, Dimanch’ marie,
Lundi matin piti dans bras;
N’a pas couvert’, n’a pas de draps,
N’a pas a rien, piti dans bras!
(Papa says no, mama says no.
It is he whom I want and who will have me.
One, two, three; don’t talk that way, my dear!
Saturday, love; Sunday, married;
Monday morning, a little one in arms.
There is no coverlet, no sheets, nothing — little one in arms!)
Tiersot gives the melody of the stanzas in 5-8 time, of the
refrain in 2-4, and describes the movements of the dancers
(the song is a Counjai) as a somewhat languorous turning
with a slight swaying of the body. I have translated
“cabanne” cabin, but in Martinique “caban” signifies a bed,
and in view of M. Tiersot’s variant text this may also
have been the meaning of the term in Louisiana.
[ 138 ]
SONGS OF THE BLACK CREOLES
Caroline
Aine, de, trois, Ca-ro-line, ^a, ^a, yd" comme ^a, ma chere!
Words and melody from“Slave Songs of the United States? The arrangement, by John Van
Broekhoven, to a variant of the poem, was printed by Mr. Cable in his essay on“The Dance
in Place Congo” and is here reprinted hy permission of Mr. Cable and the Century Co., the
words as sung on the Good Hope Plantation, St. Charles Parish, La^being restored. The mean-
ing of the words is: “One, two, three, that’s the way, my dear. Papa says no, mama says yes;
*Tis him I want and he that will have me. There will be no money to buy a cabin!’
[ 139 ]
CHAPTER XI
SATIRICAL SONGS OF THE CREOLES
A Classification of Slave Songs — The Use of Music
in Satire — African Minstrels — The Carnival in
Martinique — West Indian Pillards — Old
Boscoyo’s Song in New Orleans — Con-
clusion— An American School of
Composition
In an appendix to his “Bahama Songs and Stories’5
Professor Edwards cites John Mason Brown as giving the
following classification of the songs of the slave in an
article printed in “Lippincott’s Magazine” for Decem-
ber, 1868:
1. Religious songs, e. g.y “The Old Ship of Zion,” where the refrain of
“Glory, halleloo” in the chorus keeps the congregation well together in the
singing and allows time for the leader to recall the next verse.
2. River songs, composed of single lines separated by a barbarous and
unmeaning chorus and sung by the deck hands and roustabouts mainly for
the howl.
3. Plantation songs, accompanying the mowers at harvest, in which the
strong emphasis of rhythm was more important than the words.
4. Songs of longing; dreamy, sad and plaintive airs describing the most
sorrowful pictures of slave life, sung in the dusk when returning home from
the day’s work.
5. Songs of mirth, whose origin and meaning, in most cases forgotten,
were preserved for the jingle of rhyme and tune and sung with merry laughter
and with dancing in the evening by the cabin fireside.
6. Descriptive songs, sung in chanting style, with marked emphasis and
the prolongation of the concluding syllable of each line. One of these songs,
founded upon the incidents of a famous horse race, became almost an epidemic
among the negroes of the slave-holding States.
In this enumeration there is a significant omission. On
the plantations where Latin influences were dominant, in
New Orleans and the urban communities of the Antilles,
the satirical song was greatly in vogue. It might be said
that the use of song for purposes of satire cannot be said
to be peculiar to any one race or people or time; in fact,
Professor Henry T. Fowler, of Brown University, in his
“History of the Literature of Ancient Israel,”1 intimates
1 New York: The Macmillan Company, 1912, page 15.
[ 140 ]
SATIRICAL SONGS OF THE CREOLES
that a parallel may exist between the “taunt songs” of
primitive peoples, the Israelitish triumph songs, like that
recorded in Numbers, xxi, 27-30, the Fescennine verses
of the early Romans, and the satirical songs of the negroes
of the West Indies. Nevertheless, there is scarcely a
doubt in my mind but that the penchant for musical
lampooning which is marked among the black creoles of
the Antilles is more a survival of a primitive practice
brought by their ancestors from Africa than a custom
borrowed from their masters. What was borrowed was
the occasion which gave the practice license.
This was the carnival, which fact explains the circum-
stance that the creole songs of satire are much more
numerous in the French West Indies than in Louisiana.
The songs are not only more numerous, but their perform-
ance is more public and more malicious in intent. The
little song “Musieu Bainjo” (see page 142), melody and
words of which came from a Louisiana plantation, though
not wholly devoid of satrical sting, is chiefly a bit of
pleasantry not calculated deeply to wound the sensibilities
of its subject; very different are such songs as “Loema
tombe” (see page 147) and “Marie-Clemence” (see page
148), which Mr. Hearn sent me from Martinique. The
verse-form, swinging melodic lilt and incisive rhythm of
“Michie Preval” (see page 152) made it the most effective
vehicle for satire which creole folksong has ever known, and
Mr. Cable says that for generations the man of municipal
politics was fortunate who escaped entirely a lampooning
set to its air; but it is doubtful if even Mr. Preval, cordially
hated as he was, had to endure such cruel and spectacular
public castigation as the creators of the pillard still inflict
on the victims of their hatred. These songs will come up
for detailed consideration presently, but first it may be well
to pursue the plan which I have followed in respect of the
other elements of Afro-American folksong and point out
the obvious African origin of this satirical element.
In many, perhaps in the majority of African tribes,
there are professional minstrels whose social status now
is curiously like that of the mountebanks, actors and secular
[ 141 ]
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
Musieu Bainjo
v Voy-ez ce mu. let -
Look at that darkey
Id, Mu-sieu Bain-jo, C
there, Mister Ban-jo, ]
3g ■ 1 a t -tt-w $-m-
Jommeil est in - i
Does-rft he put <
|.' mf • ■
50 -
an
te
lent!
airs!
-f J|
*§ i
h
1 g J 3
Words and melody of this song were noted on a plantation in St. Charles Parish, Louisiana,
and first printed in “Slave Songs of the United States,” the editor remarking that it is an
"attempt of some enterprising negro to write a French song.” The particularly propulsive
effect of the African "snap” at the beginning is noteworthy.. The translation, printed by Mr-
Cable in the “Century Magazine’,* is used with his permission and that of the Century Co. In
his comment on the song Mr. Cable remarks: "We have to lose the saucy double meaning be-
tween muUt (mole) and mulatre (mulatto).” Arrangement by the author.
[ 142 ]
SATIRICAL SONGS OF THE CREOLES
musicians in Europe a few centuries ago. That these black
minstrels are not “beggars with one consent” is due to the
fact that their powers of improvization are so great and
their willingness to employ them to mercenary ends so well
known that that they are feared as well as hated, and
conciliated in the manner universal by those who can
afford to do it. These men, who are called Lashash by
the Soudanese, Nzangah (a term also applied to prosti-
tutes) by the Niam-Niam, griots , or guiriots , in Sene-
gambia and Guinea, and guehues in West Africa, are syco-
phants attached to the bodies of kings and chiefs, for whom
they exercise bardic functions. They are extremely sharp
of tongue and have no hesitation in putting their skill to
the basest of uses. Hence it comes that persons near
enough to the sources of power and preferment approach
them in the same manner in which supplicants for royal
favor have approached the mistresses of kings and poten-
tates in civilized countries time out of mind. Moreover,
as their shafts are as much dreaded as their encomiums are
desired, they collect as much tribute for what they withhold
as for what they utter, and many of them grow rich.
Thomas Ashley, in a book of travels published in 1745,1
says that they are “reckoned rich, and their wives have
more crystal blue stones and beads about them than the
king’s wives.” But, like the mediaeval European actors,
jugglers and musicians, they are not recognized as repu-
table; they are even denied the rite of burial, and in some
places their dead bodies are left to rot in hollow trees.
The weapon which these griots use against those whom
they wish to injure is satire, and this species of poetical
composition is a feature of the improvizations of the blacks
in the Antilles to-day and long has been. Bryan Edwards
says in his history of the English colonies in the West Indies :
Their songs are commonly impromptu , and there are among them indivi-
duals who resemble the improvisator i, or extempore bards of Italy; but I
cannot say much for their poetry. Their tunes in general are characteristic
of their national manners; those of the Eboes being soft and languishing; of the
Koromantyus, heroick and martial. At the same time there is observable in
most of them a predominant melancholy, which, to a man of feeling, is some-
times very affecting.
1 Cited by Engel.
[ 143 ]
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
At their merry meetings and midnight festivals, they are not without
ballads of another kind, adapted to such occasions, and here they give full
scope to a talent for ridicule which is exercised not only against each other
but also, not infrequently, at the expense of their owner or employer; but most
part of their songs at these places are fraught with obscene ribaldry and ac-
companied with dances in the highest degree licentious and wanton.
That was in the eighteenth century, when vast numbers
of the slaves were African by birth. At the end of the
nineteenth century Hearn found that satire was still a
prominent element in the songs of the black people of
Martinique. He is speaking of the blanchisseuses, hard
at work early in the morning in the rushing river at St.
Pierre.
The air grows warmer; the sky blue takes fire; the great light makes joy
for the washers; they shout to each other from distance to distance, jest,
laugh, sing. Gusty of speech these women are; long habit of calling to one
another through the roar of the torrent has given their voices a singular
sonority and force; it is well worth while to hear them sing. One starts the
song, the next one joins her; then another and another, till all the channel rings
with the melody from the bridge of the Jardin des Plantes to the Pont-bois:
“CVj-f, moin qui te, ka lave ,
Passe , raccommode ;
Y te nef he disoue,
Ou mette moin derho,
Yche moin assous bouas moin;
Laplie te ka tombe —
Lefan moin assous tete moin;
Doudoux , ou m’abandonne;
Moin pa ni pesonne pou soigne moin.”
(“It was I who washed and ironed and mended; at 9 o’clock at night thou
didst put me out of doors, with my child in my arms; the rain was falling,
with my poor straw mattress upon my head! Doudoux! thou dost abandon
me! . . . I have none to care for me.”). . . . A melancholy chant —
originally a carnival improvisation made to bring public shame upon the
perpetrator of a cruel act; but it contains the story of many of these lives —
the story of industrious, affectionate women temporarily united to brutal
and worthless men in a country where legal marriages are rare. Half of the
creole songs which I was able to collect during a residence of nearly two years
in the island touch upon the same sad theme.
Of the carnival, at which these satirical songs spring
up like poisonous fungi, Hearn draws a vivid picture, pro-
jecting it with terrible dramatic effect against an account
of a plague of smallpox. There is a last masquerade before
Lent, on Ash Wednesday — the carnival lasts a day longer
in Martinique than anywhere else. Since January there
has been dancing every day in the streets of St. Pierre;
such dancing as might be indulged in, presumably, by
decorous persons; but in the country districts African
[ 144 ]
SATIRICAL SONGS OF THE CREOLES
dances have been danced — such dances as the city never
sees. Nevertheless, a cloud rests upon the gayety because
La Verette , a terrible and unfamiliar visitor to the island,
has made her advent. The pestilence, brought from Colon
on the steamer in the preceding September, has now begun
to sweep St. Pierre, as it had already swept Fort de France,
as by a wind of death. Hundreds are dying, but there must
be the usual procession of maskers, mummers and merry-
makers. Three o’clock. There is a sound of drums. The
people tumble into the streets and crowd into the public
square:
Simultaneously from north and south, from the Mouillage and the Fort,
two immense bands enter the Grande Rue — the great dancing societies
these — the Sans-Souci and the Intrepides. They are rivals; they are the
composers and singers of those carnival songs — cruel satires most often, of
which the local meaning is unintelligible to those unacquainted with the inci-
dent inspiring the improvisation, of which the words are too often coarse or
obscene — whose burden will be caught up and re-echoed through all the burghs
of the island. Vile as may be the motive, the satire, the malice, these chants
are preserved for generations by the singular beauty of the airs, and the victim
of a carnival song need never hope that his failing or his wrong will be for-
gotten; it will be sung long after he is in his grave.
All at once a hush comes over the mob; the drums stop
and the maskers scatter. A priest in his vestments passes
by, carrying the viaticum to some victim of the dreadful
scourge. “C’est Bon-Die ka passe ” — “It is the Good-God
who goes by.” Then the merriment goes on. Night
falls. The maskers crowd into the ballrooms, and through
the black streets the Devil makes his last carnival round:
By the gleam of the old-fashioned oil lamps hung across the thoroughfares
I can make out a few details of his costume. He is clad in red, wears a hideous
blood-colored mask and a cap on which the four sides are formed by four
looking-glasses, the whole headdress being surmounted by a red lantern. He
has a white wig made of horsehair to make him look weird and old — since the
Devil is older than the world. Down the street he comes, leaping nearly his
own height, chanting words without human significance and followed by some
three hundred boys, who form the chorus to his chant, all clapping hands to-
gether and giving tongue with a simultaneity that testifies how strongly the
sense of rhythm enters into the natural musical feeling of the African — a
feeling powerful enough to impose itself upon all Spanish-America and there
create the unmistakable characteristics of all that is called “creole music.”
“ Bimbolo!”
“ Zimabolo !”
“Bimbolo!”
“Zimabolo!”
“Et Zimbolo!”
“Et bolo-po!”
[ 145 ]
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
sing the Devii and his chorus. His chant is cavernous, abysmal — booms from
his chest like the sound beaten in the bottom of a well. . . “Ti manmaille-
la , baill moin lavoix!” (“Give me voice, little folk, give me voice.”) And all
chant after him in a chanting like the rushing of many waters and with triple
clapping of hands: “Ti manmaille-la, baill moin lavoix!”, . . Then he
halts before a dwelling in the Rue Peysette and thunders:
“Eh! Marie-s ans-dent! Mi! diabe-la derho !”
That is evidently a piece of spite work; there is somebody living there
against whom he has a grudge. . .
“Hey! Marie- without-teeth! Look! The Devil is outside!”
And the chorus catch the clew.
Devil: “Eh! Maries ans-dent!”
Chorus: “Maries ans-dent! Mi! diabe-la derho!”
Devil: “Eh! Maries ans-dent!”
Chorus: “ Maries ans-dent! Mi! diabe-la derho!”
Devil: “Eh! Marie-s ans-dent 1” etc.
The Devil at last descends to the main street, always singingthe same song.
I follow the chorus to the Savanna, where the route makes for the new bridge
over the Roxelane, to mount the high streets of the old quarter of the Fort,
and the chant changes as they cross over:
Devil: “Oti one diabe-la passe larivie?” (“Where did you see the Devil
going over the river?”) And all the boys repeat the words, falling into another
rhythm with perfect regularity and ease: “Oti one diabe-la passe larivie?”
February 22d.
Old physicians indeed predicted it, but who believed them?
February 23d.
A coffin passes, balanced on the heads of black men. It holds the body of
Pascaline Z., covered with quicklime.
It is thus that the satirical songs are made in Martinique,
thus that they are disseminated. Latin civilization is less
cruel to primitive social institutions than Anglo-Saxon —
less repressive and many times more receptive. Some-
times it takes away little and gives much, as it has done
with African music transplanted to its new environment.
It has lent the charm of graceful melody to help make the
sting of creole satire the sharper; but through the white ve-
neer the black savagery sometimes comes crashing to pro-
claim its mastery in servitude. So in the case of the song
“Loema tombe”; so also in “Marie-Clemence.” (See p. 148.)
The latter is a carnival song which, if Hearn was correctly
informed, was only four years old when he sent it to
me. It is a fine illustration of that sententious dramaticism
which is characteristic of folk-balladry the world over —
that quick, direct, unprepared appeal to the imaginative
f 146 )
SATIRICAL SONGS OF THE CREOLES
Loema tombe
A pillard (satirical song) from Martinique, collected for the author in 1887 by Lafcadio
Hearn and published by him in the appendix to his book “Two Years in the French West Indies’*
(Harper & Bros., 1890). Arrangement by Frank van derStucken. Reprinted by permission of
Harper & Bros.- In sending the song to the author Mr. Hearn wrote: “'Lo6ma tombe’ is a pil -
lard, a satirical chorus chanted with clapping of hands. Loema was a girl who lived near the
Pont-Bas and affected virtue. It was learned that she received not one but many lovers. Then
the women came and sang: (Solo) You little children there
Who live by the riverside,
You tell me truly this:
Did you see Lo£ma fall?
(Cho.) Tell me truly this: Loema fall (adlib*)"
l 147 ]
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
Marie-Clemence
[ 148 ]
SATIRICAL SONGS OF THE CREOLES
W.ords .and melody from Lafcadio Hearn’s “Two Years in the French West Indies,” for which
work they were arranged by this author. They were written down by a bandmaster in Mar-
tinique. In transmitting them to Mr. Krehbiel Mr. Hearn wrote: “‘Marie- Clemence is a carni-
val satire composed not more than four years ago. The song was sung to torment MarieJCle-
mence, who was a vender of cheap cooked food.” The exclamation ‘Ai'e!’ is an example of the
yell which occurs frequently in African music. The words mean: “Marie-Clemence is cursed;
cursed, too, is her fried salt codfish (lamori fritt), her gold bead necklace (collier- choux),
all her load” Now Marie speaks: “AYel Let me be, or I shall drown myself behind yon pile of
rocksl- The Song is reprinted by permission of Harper & Bros.
[ 149 ]
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
comprehension of a people whose life is fully expressed
in the song of its own creation. Marie-Clemence was a
Machanne lapacotte , a vendor of cooked food; chiefly, it
would seem from the text, of salt codfish ( lamori fritt ).
Why she should have been made the victim of popular
hatred I do not know — perhaps never shall know, now
that the ashes of La Pelee have made a winding-sheet for
St. Pierre; but one day the devil pointed his finger at the
poor woman and pronounced her codfish accursed, also
her gold-bead necklace ( collier-choux ) and everything that
she carried in the wooden bowl above her gay madrasse .
An agony of pain and rage bursts out in the African ex-
clamation “Aie!” only to give way to her pitiful plaint:
Lague moin, lague moin, lague moin!
Moin ke ne ye co main ,
Enbas gouos pile ouoche-la!
(“Let me be, let me be, let me be! I shall drown myself behind yon pile
of rocks!”)
Sometimes the people of the Antilles do not wait for the
coming of the carnival and its devil to punish those who
have fallen under their displeasure. The custom of the
pillard prevails in Martinique and can be practised at any
time. Hearn writes: “Some person whom it is deemed
justifiable or safe to annoy may suddenly find himself
followed in the street by a singing chorus of several hundred,
all clapping their hands and dancing or running in perfect
time, so that all the bare feet strike the ground together.
Or, the pillard chorus may even take up its position before
the residence of the party disliked and then proceed with
its performances.” The song “Loema tombe” (see page
147) provides an illustration. “Loema,” wrote Mr. Hearn,
in sending me the words and melody of the song, “was
a girl who lived near the Pont-Bas and affected virtue.
It was learned that she received not one but many lovers.
Then the women came and sang:
Solo: You little children there
Who live by the riverside,
Tell me truly this:
Did you see Loema fall?
Chorus: Tell me truly this: Loema fall, etc.
[ iso ]
SATIRICAL SONGS OF THE CREOLES
Local tradition in New Orleans may have preserved the
date of the incident which gave rise to what in one of my
notes I find called “Old Boscoyo’s Song” (seepage 152), but
it has not got into my records. Mr. Cable calls the victim
of the satire “a certain Judge Preval,” and old residents
of New Orleans have told me that he was a magistrate.
If so, it would seem that he not only gave a ball which
turned out to be a very disorderly affair, but also violated
a law by giving it without a license. Many of the dancers
found their way into the calaboose, and he had to pay a
fine for his transgression and live in popular contumely
ever afterward. From various sources I have pieced to-
gether part of the song in the original, and in the translation
have included several stanzas for which at present I have
only the English version in an old letter written by Hearn:
Michie Preval li donnin gran bal,
Li fe neg’ paye pou sauter in pe.
Dans l’ecui vie la yave gran gala,
Mo ere soual la ye te bien etonne.
Michie Preval li te Capitaine bal,
Et so coche, Louis te maitr’ ceremonie.
Y’ave de negresse belles passe maitresse,
Qui vole belbel dans l’ormoire momselle.
“Comment, Sazou, te vole mo cuilotte?”
“Non, no maitr’, mo di vous mo zes prend bottes.”
Ala maitr’ geole li trouve si drole,
Li dit: “Moin aussi mo fe bal ici.”
Ye prend maitr’ Preval ye mette li prison,
Pasque li donnin bal pou vole nous l’arzan.
Monsieur Preval gave a big ball; he made the darkies pay for their little hop.
The grand gala took place in the stable; I fancy the horses were greatly
amazed.
M. Preval was Captain of the ball; his coachman, Louis, was Master of
Ceremonies.
(He gave a supper to regale the darkies; his old music was enough to give
one the colic!)
(Then the old Jackass came in to dance; danced precisely as he reared, on
his hind legs.)
There were negresses there prettier than their mistresses; they had stolen
all manner of fine things from the wardrobes of their young mistresses.
(Black and white both danced the bamboula; never again will you see
such a fine time.)
(Nancy Latiche (?) to fill out her stockings put in the false calves of her
madame.)
“How, now, Sazou, you stole my trousers?” “No, my master, I took only
your boots.”
(And a little Miss cried out: “See here, you negress, you stole my dress.”)
[ isi ]
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
Michie Preval
meat by Mr. JolmVaaBroekboven,
t 152 ]
SATIRICAL SONGS OF THE CREOLES
It all seemed very droll to the keeper of the jail; he said, “I’ll get up a dance
(of another sort) for you here.”
(At Mr. Preval’s, in Hospital street, the darkies had to pay for their little
hop.)
He took M. Preval and put him in the lock-up, because he gave a ball to
steal our money.
(Poor M. Preval! I guess he feels pretty sick; he’ll give no more balls in
Hospital street.)
(He had to pay 3100 and had a pretty time finding the money.)
(He said: “Here’s an end of that; no more balls without a permit.”)
In conclusion, a word on the value of these Afro-Ameri-
can folksongs as artistic material and their possible con-
tribution to a national American school of music. In a
large sense the value of a musical theme is wholly indepen-
dent of its origin. But for a century past national schools
have been founded on folksongs, and it is more than likely,
in spite of the present tendency toward “impressionism”
and other aesthetic aberrations, that composers will con-
tinue to seek inspiration at its source. The songs which
I have attempted to study are not only American because
they are products of a people who have long been an
integral part of the population of America, but also be-
cause they speak an idiom which, no matter what its
origin, Americans have instinctively liked from the begin-
ning and have never liked more than now. On this point
Dr. Dvorak, one of the world’s greatest nationalists, is
entitled to speak with authority. In an essay on “Music
in America,” which was printed in “The Century Maga-
zine” for February, 1895, he said:
“A while ago I suggested that inspiration for truly national music might
be derived from the negro melodies or Indian chants. I was led to take this
view partly by the fact that the so-called plantation songs are indeed the most
striking and appealing melodies that have been found on this side of the water,
but largely by observation that this seems to be recognized, though often
unconsciously, by most Americans. All races have their distinctive national
songs, which they at once recognize as their own even if they have never
heard them before. . . It is a proper question to ask, What songs, then,
belong to the American and appeal more strikingly to him than any others?
What melody would stop him on the street if he were in a strange land, and
make the home feeling well up within him, no matter how hardened he might
be, or how wretchedly the tune were played? Their number, to be sure, seems
to be limited. The most potent, as well as the most beautiful among them, ac-
cording to my estimation, are certain of the so-called plantation melodies
and slave songs, all of which are distinguished by unusual and subtle har-
monies, the thing which I have found in no other songs but those of Scotland
and Ireland.”
[ 153 ]
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
Dr. Dvorak’s contention that material for music in the
highest artistic forms might be found in the songs of the
American negroes, which was derided by quite a number
of American musicians, was long ago present in the appre-
ciative and discriminating mind of Mrs. Kemble, who, in her
life on a Georgian plantation, wished that some great
composer might hear the “semi-savage” performances of
the slaves, and said: “With a very little skilful adaptation
and instrumentation I think one or two barbaric chants
and choruses might be evoked from them that would make
the fortunes of an opera.” The opera is not yet forth-
coming, but Dr. Dvorak’s “From the New World,” which
drew its inspiration from Afro-American songs, is the most
popular of his symphonies, and his American quartet has
figured on the programmes of the Kneisel Quartet oftener
than any other work in its repertory.
In the sense which seems to be playing hide and seek
in the minds of the critics and musicians who object to
the American label, there is no American music and can
be none: Every element of our population must have its
own characteristic musical expression, and no one element
can set up to be more American than another. But sup-
pose the time come when the work of amalgamation shall
be complete and the fully evolved American people have
developed a fondness for certain peculiarities of melody
and rhythm, which fondness in turn shall disclose itself in
a decided predilection for compositions in which those pe-
culiarities have been utilized; will that music be American?
Will it be racy of the soil? Will such compositions be
better entitled to be called American than the music of
Dr. Dvorak, which employs the same elements, but con-
fesses that it borrows them from the songs of the Southern
negroes? The songs are folksongs in the truest sense;
that is, they are the songs of a folk, created by a folk,
giving voice to the emotional life of a folk; for which life
America is responsible. They are beautiful songs, and
Dr. Dvorak has shown that they can furnish the inspira-
tion for symphonic material to the composer who knows
how to employ it. To use this material most effectively
[ 154 ]
SATIRICAL SONGS OF THE CREOLES
it is necessary to catch something of the spirit of the peo-
ple to whom it is, or at least it seems, idiomatic. A na-
tive-born American ought to be able to do this quicker
and better than a foreigner, but he will not be able to do
it at all unless he have the gift of transmuting whatever
he sees or feels into music; if he have it not, he will not
write music at all; he might as well be a Hottentot as an
American.
Though it has been charged against me, by intimation
at least, it has never occurred to me in the articles which I
have written on the subject to claim that with his sympho-
ny Dr. Dvorak founded a national school of composition.
The only thing that I have urged in the matter is, that he
has shown that there are the same possibilities latent in
the folksongs which have grown up in America as in the
folksongs of other peoples. These folksongs are accom-
plished facts. They will not be added to, for the reason that
their creators have outgrown the conditions which alone
made them possible. It is inconceivable that America shall
add to her store of folksongs. Whatever characteristics of
scales or rhythm the possible future American school of com-
position is to have must, therefore, be derived from the
songs which are now existent. Only a small fraction of
these songs have been written down, and to those which
have been preserved the scientific method has not yet fully
been applied. My effort, as I have confessed, is tentative.
It ought to be looked upon as a privilege, if not a duty, to
save them, and the best equipped man in the world to do
this, and afterward to utilize the material in the manner
suggested by Dr. Dvorak, ought to be the American com-
poser. Musicians have never been so conscious as now
of the value of folksong elements. Music is seeking new
vehicles of expression, and is seeking them where they are
most sure to be found — in the field of the folksong. We
have such a field; it is rich, and should be cultivated.
[ 155 ]
APPENDIX
Weeping Mary
Moderato
A "spiritual” from Boyle Co., Kentucky, noted by Miss Mildred J. Hill, of Louisville; harmoni-
zation by Henry Holden Hass, of New York. A striking example of the major sixth in a minor
melody.
[ 157 ]
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
Some Come Cripple
Allegro con spirito
r~Q—$ ~~ W ~k— A— — -T— 1 r - -TT— — ,
— c- * — h-j j i :ii i
| Some come cripple at
\ Some come cripple ar
(Some comepray-m’ ai
' Some come sor-rin’ ai
-Jhik i
id some come lame, ) TT . - . .
. „ , J Hail the crowd of the
id some come lame; J
id some come seek, i TT „ ,, ...
. „ > Hail the crown of the
id some come weep;J
■ — i
ffi
Tg
'
9 w
■oJ- ^
A “shoal” song from Boyle Co., Kentucky, collected for the author by Miss Mildred J. Hill,
of Louisville. Arranged for this publication by Arthur Mees. The old woman, an ex- slave,
who sang it for Miss Hill had forgotten the second line of the first stanza, and repeated the
first as indicated.
[ 158 ]
APPENDIX
Neve* a Mari speak like this Man
, (“Of look-a death”)
Andante
Words and melody from “Bahama Songs and Stories',’ by Charles L. Edwards, Ph.D.( pub-
lished for the American Folk-Lore Society by Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Boston, ao4 reprint-
ed by permission. The arrangement by H. T. Burleigh.
“Then came the officers to the chief priests and Pharisees; and they said unto them, Why
have ye not brought him? The officers answered, Never man spake like this man!* St.John
Vi|; 45. 44.
[ 159]
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
i
Jesus HeaFde Sick
Andante con moto
[ 160 ]
APPENDIX
[ iol ]
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
Opon de Rock
Andante cantabile
^ Bro-the*
, $ |Jyrv 1
Andrew, whey you
A
bin. when de
A
dry wea-the’
come?
\W—
(
f £
“f8, - ^
r *■ ■■■■■r—
■ft ^ _
' +=— r
r-fidhj
[-£■- f ■■ .-f
=£=
[ 162 ]
APPENDIX
[ 163 ]
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
Nobody Knows the Trouble I See
Ten. I
Ten. II
Bass I
Bass II
Adagio, sempre rubato
here by pamissioa.
[ 164 ]
APPENDIX
Roll, Jordan,Roll
i- p f rp r
m Parson Fuller” Deacon Henshaw” Brudder Mosey” “Massa Linkum,”- etc.
2. Little chil’en, learn to fear de Lord, i 3. O, let no false nor spiteful word
And let your days be long"; Be found upon your tong-ue;
Roll, Jordan, etc. I Roll, Jordan, etc.
Words and melody from “Slave Songs of the United States!’ Arranged for men’s voices by
Arthur Me es for the Mendelssohn Glee Club of New York, and published here by permission.
It is an interesting example of the use of the flat seventh
[ 165 ]
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
Ma mourri
[ 166 ]
APPENDIX
Words and music from the“Century MagazWof February, 1886, where credit for the arrange,
meat was inadvertently given to the author; it belongs to JohnVaaBroekhoven. The transla*
tion is Mr. Cable’s.
[ 167 ]
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
Martinique Love-Song
To, to, to!
Ca qui la?
C’est moin-menme l’anmou,
Ouve la pote ba moirt'.
Tap, tap, tap!
Who taps there?
’Tis ray own self, love,
Open the door for me.
To, to, to!
£a qui la?
C’est moin-menme l’anmou,
La plie ka mouille moin.
Tap, tap, tap!
Who taps there?
’Tis my own self, love,
The rain is wetting: me.
To, to, to!
£a qui la?
C’est moin-menme l’anmou,
Qui ka ba on rhe moin!'
Tap, tap, tap!
Who taps there?
’Tis my own self, love,
Who grive my heart to thee!
Collected for the author by Lafcadio Hearn, who says of i,t in his "Two Years in the French
West Indies":" ‘To, to, to’ is very old- dates back, perhaps, to the time of the belles-affranckies,
It is seldom sung now except by survivors of the old regime: the sincerity and tenderness of
the emotion that inspired it- the old sweetness of heart and simplicity of thought.- are pass,
ing for ever away.” The arrangement was made by Frank Van der Stucken and is here reprinted
$y permission of Harper & Bros.
[168]
APPENDIX
Bmgann Sant-Kast
(The Battle of St. Cast)
Pa vann kous - ket,
enn_
noz vez
all, E
kle - viz
Night fell a - round me,
deep
in my
sleep I
heard the
son ar dhorn - ba - hal,
Son
ar <?horn
- bu - hal,
trum-pet loud re - peat,
h- t r-... — r. ~
Thro*
hall and
for - est
gs. . i
e ko-at-sal: “Ho! Sao-zon! Sao - zon!- Sao - zon fall!”
rang the_ call: “Curs’d be the Sax- ons,_ Sax-ons all!”
Rhyvelgyrch Cadpen Morgan
(Captain Morgan’s March)
l Animat o
Rhwym wrth dy wre - gys, gle&d - yf gwyn dy dad;
Forth to the bat - tie! on - ward to the fight!
Mwg y pen - tref ydd gyf - yd gyd ± a’r gwynt,
Let not the sun - light o’er our path - way close*
At
ynt
fy mack - gen!
tros
dy
wlad.
Sych
dy
ddag - rau,
Swift
as
the ea - gle
in
hts
flight!
Strong
as
yon - der
Draw
dy
gy-mrod - yr
ant
yn
gynt.
Wrth
dy
fw - a,
Till
we
o’er-throw our
Sax-
- on
foes.
Be
ye
read - y,
i - dy gyf-rssy naid,Gwrando’r saeth-auh su - o fel seirph di-baid;
foam-big tide, Rush - ing- — down, the mcun- tain-side,
byn wnath fraich yn gref, Cof- ia am dy dad, fel ba far - w ef!
sword and spear, Pour., up . on— the spoil- er near)
[ 169]
INDEX
Acadian Boat-Song, 51, 54.
Adelelmo, 59.
African travellers, musically illiterate,
13; idioms in American folksongs,
22; music, 56 et seq.; music charac-
terized, 60; recitative in, 100;
languages, survival of words from,
128.
Agwas, 57.
Aida , Oriental melodies from, 87.
Ain't I glad I got out of the Wilderness ,
15.
Albertini, 59.
Alla zoppa, 94.
Allen, William Francis, vi, 29,32,34,
43, 81, 97, 111, 129.
American Folk-Lore Society, viii;
Indian music, 51.
Americans, what are they?, 26.
And I yearde from heaven to-day , 103.
Aridas, 57.
Ashantee music, 61.
Ashley, Thomas, quoted, 143.
Asra , Der, song by Rubinstein, 87.
Atlantic Monthly, quoted, 43.
Aurore Pradere , 123.
Awassas, 57.
Babouille, dance, 116.
Bach, Sonata in E, 15.
Bacon, Theodore, “Some Breton
Folksongs,” 9.
Balatpi, songs of the, 101.
Balboa, his ships built by negroes, 26.
Ballets, 16.
Baltimore Gals , 15.
Bamboula, dance, 116.
Barzaz-Breiz , 9.
Battle-Cry of Freedom , 17, 23.
Bechuanas, 60.
Bede, the Venerable, 36.
Beethoven, use of the major sixth
in minor, 81.
Bele, dance, 66, 116.
Bell da Ringy 49.
Benguin, dance, 116.
Bescherelle, quoted, 116.
Biblical allusions in songs, 45.
Blanchisseuses of St. Pierre, their
songs, 144.
Bongo negroes, songs and dances of,
44, 113.
Bornou, song in praise of the Sultan
of, 102.
Bouene, dance, 116.
Bowditch, “Mission from Cape Coast
Castle to Ashantee,” 60, 62.
Brittany, folksongs of, 9.
Bryant’s Minstrels, 33.
Buchner, Max, “Kamerun,” quoted,
67.
Buffalo Gals, 15.
Bulgarians, folksongs of the, 7.
Burial customs of the Africans and
slaves, 103 et seq.
Burleigh, Henry T., his help ac-
knowledged, viii.
Burney, Dr. Charles, quoted, 72.
Burtchell, W. T., “Travels in the In-
terior of Africa,” quoted, 60.
Burton, Richard F., “Lake Regions
of Central Africa,” quoted, 44, 57,
101.
Busch, Moritz, “Wanderungen zwi-
schen Hudson und Mississippi,”
quoted, 12.
Cable, George W., credited and
quoted, viii, 38, 40, 138, 141.
Calhoun School Collection of Plan-
tation Songs, quoted, 43, 71, 82, 87.
Calinda ( and Caleinda), a dance, 66,
67, 116.
Cameron, Verney Lovett, “Across
Africa,” quoted, 101, 113.
Camptown Races , 16.
Canada, folksongs of, vi, 22.
Can't stay behind , 49.
Capello and Ivens, “From Benguela
to the Territory of Yucca, ’’quoted,
113.
Captain Morgan's March , 10, 169.
Carnival celebration and songs in
Louisiana and the French West
Indies, 141 et seq .
Caroline , 138, 139.
Cassuto, 121.
Cata (or Chata), a dance, 116.
Century Company and Magazine,
credited and quoted, viii, 30, 38,
40, 138, 152.
Chadwick, George W., writes Ameri-
can music, v.
Charleston Gals, 15.
China, use of pentatonic scale in its
music, 7; a missionary’s experience
with hymns, 76.
Christy’s Minstrels, 12, 15.
Classification of Slave Songs, 140.
Coleridge-Taylor, Samuel, composer,
44, 47, 59, 73.
Collections of Slave Songs, 42, 43.
Columbus, negroes come with him to
America, 26.
Combat de Saint-Cast, 9, 169.
Come tremble-ing down , 84, 85, 87.
Congo, a dance, 126.
Congos, their music, 57.
[ 171 ]
INDEX- — Continued
Continental Monthly, quoted, 43.
Coon songs, 2, 16.
Cotolies, 57.
Counjai (or Counjaille), a dance,
116 et seq.
Creole, meaning of the term, 134;
grammar of the patois, 127 et seq.;
songs of, 35, 37, 38 et seq.; use of
satire, 140.
Criole candjo , 116, 118.
Cruelty to slaves, 25.
Cui, Cesar, on Russian folksongs, 7.
Dahomans, 60, 61, 67, 77, 79; death
customs of, 108; dances of, 133.
Dances of the American negroes, 95,
112 et seq.
Dandy Jim of Caroline , 16.
Daudet, Alphonse, his use of a Creole
song, 135.
Day, Charles William, “Five Years’
Residence in the West Indies,”
quoted, 12.
Denham and Clapperton, “Narra-
tive of Travels in Northern and
Central Africa,” quoted, 102.
Denmark, folksongs of, 5.
Dese all my fader’s children, 108.
Dessan mouillage, etc., a Martinique
dance, 125, 126.
Devil, in Carnival dances of Martini-
que, 145.
Devil songs, 16, 34.
Dig my Grave , 103, 104.
Dimitry, Alexander, 40.
Dixie, 33.
Done wid driber’s dr third , 17, 19.
Drums and drumming, 61, 65; as
signals, 65; in Martinique, 66; in
Unyanebe, 67; in New Orleans, 67;
in Voodoo, Congo and Calinda
dances, 67; in Kamerun, 67; in
Bashilonga, 67.
Du Bois, W. E. Burghardt, “The
Souls of Black Folk,” quoted, vi, 17;
on the negro in America, 27; 43.
Du Chaillu, Paul B., “Explorations
and Adventures in Equatorial
Africa,” quoted, 106.
Dvorak, Antonin, use of American
idioms, iv; 153 et seq.
Edwards, Bryan, “The History, Civil
and Commercial, of the British
Colonies in the West Indies,”
quoted, 106, 107.
Edwards, Charles L., 36; “Bahama
Songs and Stories,” 43, 106, 107,
128, 140.
Ein Ldmmlein geht und tragt die
Schuld, 58.
Emancipation, songs of, 17 et seq.
Emgann Sant-Kast , 169.
Emmet, Dan, 33.
Endemann, K., “Mittheilungen liber
die Sotho-Neger,” 106.
Engel, Carl, “Introduction to the
Study of National Music,” quoted,
5, 44, 77, 87, 102, 143.
Exposure of slaves, 24.
Fantees, music of, 62.
Father Abraham , 87, 90.
Feedas, 57.
Fenner, Thomas P., 42, 71.
Fescennine verses of the Romans, 141.
Fetich man’s fortune-telling, 101.
Fiddle sings, 16, 34.
Fillmore, John C., 65.
Finland, folksongs of, 5, 7; racial re-
lation of its people, 7; its Orpheus,
8; its epic, 8; its runo songs, 8.
Fisk Jubilee Singers and their Collec-
tion, 16, 17, 42, 71, 82, 84, 91, 95.
Five-four time, 8.
Folkdances, rhythms of, 6.
Folksongs defined, 2; how composed,
3, 4, 23; parallelisms between, 14;
are the American slave songs folk-
songs?, 26 et seq.; of Sweden, 5;
Russia, 5; Norway, 5; Wallach-
ia, 5; Denmark, 5; Finland, 5;
Serbs, 7; Bulgarians, 7; Montene-
grins, 7; Bretons, 9; Canadians,
22; created by national crises, 23.
Fonda, 57.
Forten, Miss Charlotte L., quoted, 49.
Foster, Stephen C., 16.
Fourth, the interval omitted, 69, 70.
Fowler, Prof. Henry T., “History of
the Literature of Ancient Israel,”
quoted, 140.
Freely go, marching along, 87, 88.
Friedenthal, Albert, .“Musik, Tanz
und Dichtung bei den Kreolen
Amerikas,” quoted, 38, 59, 68,
93, 114.
Funeral music and customs, 103 et seq.
Gigueiroa, 59.
Gluck, Che faro senza Euridice, 57.
Gottschalk, his use of a Creole
melody, 135.
Grant, James Augustus, “A Walk
Across Africa,” quoted, 46, 67.
Great Campmeetin ’, 71, 77, 78, 79.
Gregorian Chant, conservatism re-
garding the, 37.
[ 172 ]
INDEX — Continued
Grimm, on the origin of folksongs, 3.
Griots, 38, 143.
Grout, the Rev. Louis, “Zulu-Land,
etc.”, quoted, 101.
Grove, “Dictionary of Music and
Musicians,” quoted, 76, 92.
Guehues, African minstrels, 143.
Guiouba (or Juba), dance, 116.
Gwine follow, 15.
Habanera, dance, 59, 68, 93, 114, 115.
Hahn, Theophilus, quoted, 58.
Hallowell, Miss Emily, quoted, viii,
71, 82, 91. #
Hampton Institute and Collection of
Songs, 21, 30, 42, 91, 97.
Handel, Dead march in “Saul,” 44.
Hard Trials , 71.
Harmony in African and slave music,
60, 64, 81.
Harper & Brothers, acknowledgement
to, viii.
Haskell, Marion Alexander, quoted, 30.
Haytian dances, 94.
Hearn, Lafcadio, his letters, and
“Two Years in the French West
Indies,” quoted, 35, 37, 47, 55, 66,
121, 125, 134, 135, 141, 144, 145,
149, 151.
Heaven bell a-ring, 49.
Hebrew music, 7.
Hiawatha , 8.
Higginson, Col. Thomas Wentworth,
vi; quoted, 17, 21, 23, 29, 43, 44,
45, 49, 50, 109.
Hill, Miss Mildred J., quoted, 32,
72, 91.
Hiuen, Chinese instrument, 74.
Holub, Dr., “Seven Years in South
Africa,” quoted, 113.
Hook, quoted, 93.
Ho, round the corn, Sally, 48, 128.
Hottentots, singing of, 58, 60, 61.
Hughes, Rupert, “The Musical Guide,”
quoted, 2.
Hungary, folk-music of, 87.
Huss, Henry Holden, acknowledge-
ment to, 8.
Iboes, 57.
Idioms of folksongs, 56 et seq.
I Know Moonlight, 109.
I Look o'er Yander , 103, 105, 107.
Pm gwine to Alabamy , 51, 52.
Imitations in songs of American
negroes, 14 et seq.
Imitative capacity of negroes, 58.
In bright mansions above , 16.
Indians, American, their pentatonic
scale, 7; their songs, 72.
Influence of Negro music on American
peoples, 59.
Instruments, African, 68.
Intrepides, Martinique dancing so-
ciety, 145.
I saw the beam in my sister’s eye, 15.
Israelitish taunt and triumph songs,
141.
I want to be my Fader’s chil’en , 102.
Jackson, Miss, original Jubilee sing-
er, 84.
Japan, pentatonic scale in, 7.
Jesus heal ’ de sick, 160.
Jews, their synagogal music, 7.
Jim Crow songs, 34.
Jiminez, pianist, 59.
Jine ’em, 49.
Jubilee Singers of Fisk University.
(See Fisk.)
Jump Jim Crow , 16.
Kaffirs, music of 61; singing of, 82.
Kalewala, Finnish epic, 8.
Kantele, Finnish harp, 8.
Kemble, Mrs. Frances Anne, “Jour-
nal of a Residence on a Georgian
Plantation,” 46, 154.
Kidson, Frank, on the pentatonic
scale, 76.
Kolbe, Peter, “Caput Bonae Spei
Hodiernum,” quoted, 60.
Kolo dance of Servians, 77.
Korrigan, 10.
Koundjo, 116 et seq.
Kroeger, Edward R., v.
Kroomen, music of, 57.
Labat, Pere, quoted, 66.
Laing, Major A. G., “Travels in
Western Africa,” 106.
Language, forgotten, 36; corrupted by
slaves, 127 et seq.
Lashash, Soudanese minstrels, 143.
Lay this body down , 49.
Leading-tone (seventh), 84.
Lewis, M. G., “A Journal of a Resi-
dence among the Negroes of the
West Indies,” quoted, 25.
Lily Dale, 17.
Lippincott’s Magazine, quoted, 107.
Livingstone, quoted, 121.
Loema tombe, 141, 149, 150.
Longfellow, “Hiawatha,” 8.
Lyon, George Francis, “Narrative of
Travels in Northern Africa,”
quoted, 46.
Mabunda, dance, 113.
McKim, Miller, quoted, 24.
[ 173 ]
INDEX — Continued
McKim, Miss Lucy, quoted, 12, 71.
McLeod, Norman, on Irish music, 6.
Macrum, W., song quoted, 120.
Magyars (Hungarians), rhythm of
their songs, 6; are Scythians, 7;
their music, 87, 94.
Mahrchen, 1.
Major Mode, a symbol of gayety,
4; in Russia, 7; prevalence of, 5;
in negro songs, 43 etseq., variations
of, 70 et seq.
Makalaka, 101.
Malagasy, rhythms of, 97.
Ma mourri , 167.
Man-mam Colette , Martinique dance,
125, 126.
Manyuema, dances of, 113.
Many thousand go, 17, 18.
Many thousands gone , 17, 20.
Marching through Georgia , 23.
Marie-Clemence , 146, 147.
Marimba, 68.
Marriage forbidden to black Creoles,
138.
Marsh, J. B. T., “Story of the Jubilee
Singers,” 42.
Martinique, dances, 125, 126.
Mauch, Carl, “Reisen in Siid-Afri-
ka,” quoted, 101.
Meens, 57.
Mees, Arthur, credited, vii; on the
flat seventh and harmony, 79.
Melancholy in folkmusic, 5.
Mercier, Dr. Alfred, “Etude sur la
Langue Creole en Louisiane,”
quoted, 130 et seq.
Meringue, Haytian dance, 94.
Michael row the boat ashore , 49.
Michie Preval , 141, 151, 152.
Minor Mode, a symbol of gravity,
4; prevalence, 5; 29, 30; 43 et seq.;
70, 83 etseq.; sixth omitted in scale,
70, 84; leading-tone in, 84.
Mixolydian mode, 77, 79.
Modes of slave songs in America,
43 et seq.
Mohr, Eduard, “Nach den Victoria-
fallen des Zambesi,” quoted, 101.
Moloney, A. C., “Notes on Yoruba,
etc.,” quoted, 66.
Moodie, John W. D., “Ten Years in
South Africa,” quoted, 57.
Moors, as slaves, 57.
Mother , is Massa gwine to sell us to-
morrow?, 17.
Moton, Robert R., 30.
Murphy, Mrs. Jeannette Robinson,
quoted, 82, 108.
Musieu Bainjo, 141, 142.
Musikalisches Wochenblatt, quoted,
94.
My Heart's in the Highlands , 58.
Nagos, 57.
“Nation, The,” quoted, 33.
Negroes in America, 26, 27; census
reports, 27.
Neve ’ a man speak like this man , 159.
Niam-Niam minstrels, 64, 143.
Nobody knows the trouble I see , 74,
75, 96, 164.
Nocturnal songs and dances, 103.
No Man, 49.
No more peck of corn , 18, 23.
Norway, folksongs of, 5.
O du lieber Augustin, 58.
O'er the Crossing, 97, 98, 128.
O Graveyard, 109, 110.
0 Haupt voll Blut und Wunden , 58.
Oh, Freedom over me, 17.
0, Rock me, Julie, 51, 52.
Ole Virginny nebber tire, 15.
Opon de Rock, 162.
Oriental scale, 87, 91.
Ou beau di moin tete , Martinique
dance, 125, 126.
Paloma, La, Mexican song, 115.
Parallelisms between folksongs, 14.
Pauv ti Lele, 135.
Peabody, Charles, on working songs,
47.
Pentatonic scale, 7, 43, 69, 70, 73
et seq.
Pillard, satirical song of the Creoles,
141 et seq.
Pitch, frequently vague in the sing-
ing of slaves, 70 et seq.
Plain-Song, 64.
Plantation Life, influence of, 22.
Plato and the sacred chants of the
Egyptians, 36.
Plattsburg, battle of, 16.
Poles, folksongs of, 87.
Popos, 57.
Pov ’ piti Lolotte, 135, 136.
Praise Member, 49.
Proyart, Abbe, “History of Loango,
Kakongo, etc.,” quoted, 107.
Ragtime, iii: 2, 6, 48, 92, 93.
Rain fall and wet Becky Martin, 49,
50.
Rakoczky March, 46, 87.
Ranz des Vaches prohibited, 46.
Reade, W. Winwood, “The African
Sketchbook,” quoted, 47.
Recitative in African song, 100 et seq.
[ 174 ]
INDEX — Continued
“Reel Tunes,” 16.
Reid, Ogden Mills, Editor of the
N. Y. Tribune, acknowledgements
to, viii.
Religion and music, 9, 29.
Religion so sweet , 49.
Religious character of the plantation
folksongs, 42.
Remon, Remon, 122.
Rhythm and rhythmical distortions,
6, 95.
Rhyvelgyrch Cadpen Morgan , 10, 169.
Rice, “Daddy,” 16.
Richardson, the Rev. J., quoted, 97.
River, roustabout and rowing songs,
34, 48, 49, 51.
Roche, Louise, 38, 39.
Roll , Jordan , roll , 102, 165.
Romaika, 33.
Roosevelt, Theodore, 92.
Root, George F., The Battle-Cry of
Freedom , 17.
Round about the mountain , 63.
Runo songs of the Finns, 8.
Russell, W. H., “My Diary, North
and South,” quoted, 111.
Russia, folksongs of, 5; influence of
suffering, 6; dances, 6.
Saint-Cast, Battle of, 9, 169.
Salas, Brindis de, 59.
Sanko, African instrument, 62.
Sanskrit prayers in China, 36.
Sans-Souci, Martinique dancing so-
ciety, 145.
Satire in songs of the Creoles, 140
et seq.
Scales, origin of, 91; Oriental, 91.
Schauenburg, “Reisen in Central-
Afrika,” quoted, 66.
Schweinfurth, Dr. Georg, “Heart of
Afrika,” quoted, 64, 113.
Scotch songs, 83.
Second, the augmented interval in
folksongs, 7, 84.
Secular songs, paucity of, among
American slave songs, 28, 34.
Serbs, augmented second in their
music, 7.
“Settin’ up” in the Bahamas, 107.
Seventh (interval), flatted, 69, 70,
71; omitted, 69, 70; raised to
leading-tone in minor, 69.
Seward, Theodore F., 42, 95.
Shamans of the North American
Indians, 107.
Shock along, John , 48.
“Shout” and “Shouting,” 32 et seq.;
95, 106, 109, 112.
Sibree, the Rev. James W., quoted,
97.
Sierra Leone, singing of the negroes
in, 44, 60.
Silcher, Friedrich, Zu Strassburg auf
der Schanz, 2; Ich weiss nicht , was
soil es bedeuten , 2.
Sixth (interval), major in minor
scales, 69, 70, 81, 84; omitted, 69,
84.
Slavery in America, 36, 56 et seq.
Slaves, American, not all negroes, 56.
“Slave Songs of the United States”
(collection), vi, 16, 17, 26, 29, 32,
34, 42, 43, 48, 49, 50, 53, 71, 81,
91,97, 100, 109, 116, 121, 138.
Smith, Captain John, on rattles in
Virginia, 13.
Snap (Scots’, Scotch, Scottish, etc.),
6, 48, 68, 83, 92 et seq., 135.
Socos, 57.
Some come cripple, 158.
Soyaux, Hermann, “Aus West-Afri-
ka,” quoted, 44, 60.
Spanish melody on African rhythm, 83.
Spaulding, H. G., credit, vi; “Under
the Palmetto,” quoted, 12, 17, 43.
Spencer, Herbert, his theory on the
origin of music, 3, 4, 29.
Spirituals, 16.
Spohr, Louis, on intervals in folk-
song, 72.
Squire, Irving, “American History
and Encyclopaedia of Music,”
quoted, 47.
Strathspey reel, 92.
Structural forms of the Afro-Ameri-
can folksongs, 100 et seq.
Suffering, provocative of folksong, 4.
Sweden, folksongs of, 5.
Take him to the gully, 24.
Tango, 93, 114.
Tant shop est doux, 116, 117.
Tiersot, Julien, his monograph on
American folksongs, quoted, vi,
32, 35, 36, 84, 135, 138.
Tomlinson, Reuben, 50.
To, to, to, 166.
Tramp, tramp , tramp, 23.
Tribune, New York newspaper, cre-
dited, iii, iv.
Triple time in negro songs, 95.
Trowbridge, Col., quoted, 50.
Tschaikowsky, “Pathetic” symphony,
8.
Turiault, “Etude sur la Langue
Creole,” quoted, 40.
Turkey-trot, 93, 114.
[ 175 ]
INDEX — Continued
Valdez, Francisco Travassos, “Six
Years of a Traveler’s Life in West-
ern Africa,” quoted, 106.
Van Broekhoven, John A., acknow-
ledgements to, viii.
Variations from conventional scales,
68.
Villemarque, Th. Hersart de la,
Barzaz-Breiz , 9.
Volkslied, 1.
Volksthiimliches Lied, 1.
Vologeso, Italian opera, 92.
Voodoo songs, 35, 37, 40, 67.
Wachtel, Dr. Aurel, quoted, 74.
Wagner, Nibelung rhythm in Africa,
58.
Wainamoinen, Finnish Orpheus, 8.
Waitz, Theodor, “Anthropologie der
Naturvolker,” 106.
Wallachia, folksongs of, 5.
Wallaschek, Dr. Richard, “Primi-
tive Music,” 11; his arguments
traversed, 11 et seq.; a careless in-
vestigator, 12; 46, 47, 57, 58, 59,
60, 115, 121.
Wangemann, Dr., 82.
Ware, Charles Pickard, 49.
Washington, Booker T., vi, 47.
Wearing of the Green , 16.
Weber, Carl Maria von, Wir tvinden
dir , 2.
Weber, Ernst von, “Vier Jahre in
Afrika,” quoted, 101.
Weeping Mary, 80, 81, 157.
Weissmann, Hermann, “Unter deut-
scher Flagge durch Afrika,” quoted,
67.
We'U soon be free, 21.
Welsh and Bretons, 9, 10.
Wentworth, the Rev. Dr., 76.
Wesley, the Rev. John, on the Devil
and good tunes, 34.
White, George L., manager of the
Jubilee Singers, 42, 82.
White, Jose, violinist, 59.
Who is on the Lord's side?, 16.
Whole-tone scale, 51.
Wood, J. Muir, 72.
Woodville, Jenny, quoted, 107.
Working songs of the slaves, 46 et seq.
Wulsin, Mrs., her copy of an Acadian
song, 51.
You may bury me in the east, 31,
84, 86.
Zanze, African instrument, 61, 68, 74.
Ziehn, Bernhard, “Harmonielehre,”
quoted, 81.
Zip Coon, 15.
Zoellner, Heinrich, quoted, 77.
Zombi, 40.
Zulu-Kafirs, songs of, 101.
Zuhi Indians, singing of, 72.
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